Comrades! GPS is now officially much, much better, thanks to the Russians: with their GLONASS global positioning system now online, you'll get the sweet sweet coverage you deserve, even deep in the midst of urban jungles.

The Russians, being Russian, have decided to optimize their shiny new GLONASS GPS satellite constellation for the northern hemisphere, unlike our own capitalist dog GPS, which works equally well all over the world. Huh, that seems backwards somehow. Anyway, what this means to you is that you're more likely to get a good GLONASS fix here in the U.S., especially in areas where most GPS systems would have a hard time, like in cities with tall buildings that block out the sky.

GLONASS receivers are juuuuust starting to trickle into mobile devices, and Qualcomm is showing off what a hybrid GPS/GLONASS chipset can do when it comes to precision navigation. On a New York City street, a Qualcomm dev phone using just GPS was able to see two satellites (not enough for a position fix), but when they enabled the GLONASS receiver, twelve more satellites showed up. Not too shabby. Qualcomm says that in general, combining GLONASS and GPS will improve accuracy in "deep urban environments" by about 50%.

The GLONASS receiver is a hardware upgrade, not a software upgrade, so although Qualcomm says it won't cost much extra going forward (there's no subscription or anything), you're gonna have to buy a new phone (or GPS or whatever) that can decode the GLONASS signal. Look for new phones with dual GPS receivers next year, and don't forget that within the next five or ten years, we'll have Chinese and European satellite positioning systems mixing it up as well.

Via PCMag