Charles Petzold

I've been writing a book about Windows 8 programming using one of the Samsung tablets distributed about a year ago at the Build conference. It works great for most of the programming I've been doing, but I've been having lots of problems with the compass and accelerometer-related sensors. Sometimes they work erratically and sometimes not at all.

For example, today I've been trying to explore the OrientationSensor class. Events were fired rarely, and the RotationMatrix always had zero values (although the Quaternion had non-zero values), and then it stopped working entirely, even after a reboot.

Has anybody had success accessing these sensors on a commercially available tablet with Windows 8 installed?