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More fascinating to me is that Garmin uses Sony for GPS chips. Given their long history and penetration in marine and aviation, I’m surprised they can’t or don’
by arpinum 6y ago
More fascinating to me is that Garmin uses Sony for GPS chips. Given their long history and penetration in marine and aviation, I’m surprised they can’t or don’t want to compete with Sony. Sad if this means Garmin is on the decline.
- imglorp 6y agoMore likely they use Sony for cheap consumer items. Garmin also makes high accuracy survey and aviation products which I'd bet are custom.
- mthoms 6y agoI think they only use the Sony chips in their watch line up. Hopefully someone else can confirm.
- stevehawk 6y agoThey wouldn't be used in their aviation devices, its a different type of GPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System
- jcrawfordor 6y agoA surprising number of consumer GPS receivers use WAAS - it's pretty inexpensive to add since the WAAS corrections are downlinked as part of a GPS datastream you need to decode anyway for ephemeris.
- maxerickson 6y agoThe description in the article makes it sound like Sony came out with a much better low power chip. I'm not sure how big a factor battery size is for these watches, but they might not have had much choice. I have a Garmin 645 Music and wouldn't get anything bigger to replace it.
- nradov 6y agoGarmin hasn't designed their own wearable devices GPS (GNSS) chips for many years. They used MediaTek chips since about 2010. Then a couple years ago they switched to Sony for better battery life.