The purpose of Location Acquisition API is to enable terminal applications to retrieve information related to the current location of the mobile device.
In addition, Location Acquisition API is capable of utilizing different types of hardware and positioning technologies to actually retrieve the location information.
Client applications use Location Acquisition API to obtain estimates of the location the device is in at the moment. To get the information, Location Acquisition API uses Location Server, which is only required to support the communication protocol used by Location Acquisition API. Location Server performs all the operations to execute the client’s requests. Location Acquisition API makes the client application independent of client-server communication details.
Location Acquisition API may be used by different types of applications utilizing location information and providing it in different forms to the user.
Location Acquisition API defines a standard set of location information (latitude, longitude, altitude, accuracy and time) that most types of positioning technologies are able to produce. However, Location Acquisition API is also able to return extended information (such as speed) and also technology specific data (e.g. satellite data).
Location Acquisition API uses only those external interfaces and data types that have been defined in the Symbian OS. It uses Location Server from S60 Location Framework to provide location services to the client applications. However, even if Location Server does not exist on the system, certain parts of Location Acquisition API (such as the position data classes) can still be used.
Location Acquisition API is available from S60 release 2.6 onwards.