Your device is a remarkable feat of engineering. It’s half a dozen or more gadgets packed into a single slab. Much of it’s coolest feats are accomplished with a wide range of sensors — but what are they and what do they all actually do?

How does your phone count your steps and replace your fitness tracker? Does GPS use up your data? Which sensors should you make sure are in your next handset?

Here’s all you need to know.

Accelerometer

Accelerometers handle axis-based motion sensing and can be found in fitness trackers as well as phones—they’re the reason why your smartphone can track your steps even if you haven’t bought a separate wearable.

They also tell the phone’s software which way the handset is pointing, something that’s becoming increasingly important with the arrival of augmented reality apps.

As the name kind of gives away, accelerometers measure acceleration, so the map inside Snapchat can put a cute toy car around your bitmoji when you’re driving, plus a host of other actually useful applications.

Gyroscope

The gyroscope helps the accelerometer out with understanding which way your phone is orientated— it adds another level of precision so those 360-degree photo spheres really look as impressive as possible.

Whenever you play a racing game on your phone and tilt the screen to steer, the gyroscope rather than the accelerometer is sensing what you’re doing, because you’re only applying small turns to the phone and not actually moving through space.

Magnetometer

Completing the triumvirate of sensors responsible for working out where a phone is in physical space is the magnetometer. Again the name gives it away—it measures magnetic fields and can thus tell you which way is north by varying its voltage output to the phone.

When you go in and out of compass mode in Google Maps, that’s the magnetometer kicking in to work out which way up the map should be. It also powers standalone compass apps.

GPS

Ah, GPS—Global Positioning System technology—where would we be without you? Probably in a remote, muddy field, cursing the day we ditched our paper maps for the electronic equivalents.

GPS units inside phones gets a ping from a satellite up in space to figure out which part of the planet you’re standing on (or driving through).

They don’t actually use any of your phone’s data, which is why you can still see your location when your phone has lost signal, even if the map tiles themselves are a blurry, low-res mess.

Proximity Sensor

The proximity sensor usually sits up near the top speaker and combines an infrared LED and light detector to work out when you have the phone up to your ear, so that screen can be switched off. The sensor emits a beam of light that gets bounced back, though it’s invisible to the human eye.

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