PhoneGap Essentials: Building Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

10. Accelerometer

The Accelerometer API allows a PhoneGap application to determine a device’s orientation in a three-dimensional space (using X, Y, and Z coordinates). The current PhoneGap API documentation claims that the values returned by the accelerometer indicate the changes in a device’s motion through space, but in testing what the accelerometer returns are values that define the device’s actual orientation in a three-dimensional space. If the accelerometer were actually measuring motion through space, then the accelerometer API would return no information when the device is stationary, which is not the case.

For example, on an Android device, with the device lying flat on a tabletop, the accelerometer will return approximately the following ...