14 DAY TRIAL // One of the features that Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has announced for its latest Lumia devices out there at the BUILD 2014 conference in San Francisco is Nokia SensorCore, which will allow applications to take full advantage of the sensors packed inside devices.
Moreover, as Nokia explains, they will be able to do so without worrying that they could drain battery life, which should greatly improve the experience that users receive from their smartphones.
The Nokia SensorCore is meant to provide said low power functionality to Nokia Lumia 1520, Lumia Icon and Lumia 930 handsets, as well as for the cheaper Nokia Lumia 630 and Lumia 635 smartphones, Nokia explains.
At the same time, the company is determined to allow developers to take full advantage of the capability, and has announced the availability of a Nokia SensorCore SDK.
The kit includes all the necessary APIs that developers need in order to build Windows Phone 8.1 applications that can tap into the capabilities of Nokia SensorCore, the company announced. It will be released for all of the aforementioned handsets, it seems.
“The Nokia SensorCore SDK provides developers APIs to access step counter and activity information but also capabilities to record your location data in a very low power mode,” Nokia notes in a blog post.
Courtesy of Nokia SensorCore, the smartphone will know when the user is walking, running, or does anything else that involves location. Thus, the device can be set to perform specific tasks when certain criteria are met, the company explains.
“For example, your phone could automatically calculate how many calories you burn when doing your usual jog on Monday morning or when window shopping in a local mall. Your phone will be able to show you how much time you have spent at your workplace during the week,” Nokia notes.
Smartphones pack a variety of sensors inside, and that does not refer to Nokia’s handsets alone, but to all devices out there. As Timo Joutsenvirta, technology marketing manager at Nokia, notes, the company’s devices have had sensors for years, and they sometime work even without users realizing it.
“We’re now at a point where many other applications, like fitness and health applications, also want to utilize sensor data. In order for these apps to understand how you move throughout the day they continuously need to collect sensor data, which may put a strain on battery life,” Joutsenvirta said.
“To overcome the battery drain problem, we needed to implement a new software solution that was capable of running at very low power as well as a hardware component that acts as a buffer between the sensors and the applications.”
Windows Phone developers interested in building applications capable of taking advantage of real-time sensor data coming straight from users should grab the Nokia SensorCore SDK when it comes to Nokia Developer, Mikko Lönnfors, lead program manager at Nokia, added.