The Sony Xperia ION and Sony Xperia S will both be able to use the Russian and US Global Positioning Satellite networks making them significantly better at finding your location than any other phone.

By using both the US GPS network and also the Russian GLOSNASS network the smartphones and all future Xperia smartphones will have double the number of satellites to call on should they run into trouble.

What does that mean for us punters? Well for a start most smartphones require a minimum of four satellites to get a lock onto your location, to do this they have 31 GPS Satellites to choose from. However now, they will have 55 satellites to call upon, increasing both the likelihood of a connection and also the accuracy of your position in built up areas such as city centers.

To save on precious battery life the handsets will only extend to the Russian network when it's struggling to use the existing GPS. Backwards compatible with almost all Android apps that utilise GPS this will see major improvements when using apps such as Google Maps and Google Navigation.

Source: ZDnet