Android Sensor Programming By Example

Sensor's sampling period, power, and battery consumption

When you are registering an event listener, you can suggest a sampling period or delay between the sensor event values in microseconds. This sampling period is only a signal to the operating system to send the sensor values at the suggested sampling rate via the OnSensorChanged() method. The operating system might choose a bigger delay, depending on the load on the processer, and that's why it is discouraged to build a time-sensitive logic that relies on the delay between the sensor events.

You can only specify the absolute delay from Android 3.0 (API Level 11) and above. Prior to this version, you could only use the following four constants supported by the platform:

• SENSOR_DELAY_FASTEST ...