Here's Why Your Phone's Proximity Sensors Are So Important

They do way more than you might think.

George Mattock/Getty Images

Any recent smartphone, be it an Android device or an iPhone, is chock-full of sensors. It wasn't always this way, but after the original 2007 iPhone, many sensor-reliant features quickly became standard. And of course, phone makers are constantly trying to one-up each other, sometimes in ridiculous ways. For a few years, some Google Pixel phones offered external temperature readers — no matter that even if the technology were bulletproof, a phone would still be an unreliable way to check for fever, never mind whether your chicken is done.

Particularly important are proximity sensors. These are actually a category rather than a specific kind of sensor, but they're so critical that the phone you're using has several of them. Arguably, smartphones would be impossible without them.

Here we're going to cover what constitutes a proximity sensor and how...

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