Less than a month before the launch by Ariane 5 of four new satellites carrying the GALILEO constellation to 18 satellites, manufacturers of tracking components have already presented their new tracking chips supporting European GNSS. This allowed the Spanish company BQ to offer the first “Galileo-ready” smartphone at the beginning of September., equipped with processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 652, l’Aquarius X5 Plus.
We might have expected to find the same chip in the iPhone 7 from Apple, which has since fitted the iPhone 4S and the iPad 3 all of its mobile devices with Qualcomm communications processors, integrating GPS reception (US) and GLONASS (Russian), it's nothing. With this latest smartphone, Apple reconnects with Broadcom, sidelined since 2012 to perform these functions, by integrating a chip BCM47734.