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What kind of pressure does it measure? Air pressure? Finger pressure on the touchscreen?

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2 Answers

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Some devices, like the Motorola Xoom, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active and the Galaxy Nexus, have an air pressure sensor built into them that measures the barometric air pressure. I have the Barometer HD app installed on my Xoom which seems to give roughly the same reading as my Suunto electronic barometer.

Support for a barometer pressure (and other environmental) sensor was added in Android 2.3 To follow the trend of linking to the related developer resource, I believe this is a TYPE_PRESSURE sensor.

See also this related StackOverflow question Android devices with pressure sensor, and this Gizmodo article for some of the possible uses for the barometer, which includes helping the device to calculate your altitude in GPS apps.

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It measures finger pressure on the touchscreen.

Source: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEvent.html#getPressure(int)

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Why do you think that the pressure sensor does the same thing as the getPressure(int) function? Especially since the sensor doesn't take an int to get a specific location. – Christian Oct 4 '10 at 15:13
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Yes, if we want to get pedantic, you can have an arbitrary pressure sensor that senses anything and extends android.hardware.Sensor. But in the end, 99.999% of devices out there provide a pressure reading for the pressure of the finger on the touchscreen. – Rohan Singh Oct 4 '10 at 15:43

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