Maybe you and all the others that "know better" should read what the author wrote:
Long story short, precision clocks are needed for what is called 'inertial navigation', where you map your position with time using accelerometers. ships have used for a long time, and a version of this navigation is already on our phones. it is how they get the direction when you start the navigation.
because you calculate the path by measuring time and acceleration/angular moment, if you do not have a good clock you make a lot of errors, and this is why portable atomic clocks are needed. exciting research by our colleagues on quantum gyroscopes should make this thing even better, but the first bottleneck at this point is to make a portable high accurate clock.
The problem is, read what you bolded. The
first bottleneck. That implies that this innovation is immediately applicable and useful on its own.
Regardless, even if you interpret that sentence differently, the entire original article gives absolutely no hint that there's another entirely new innovation required to provide the claimed benefits. It's essentially one group claiming the credit for hypothetical future work done by someone else.
Keep in mind that if you had a
choice between getting the atomic clock in your phone
OR this hypothetical quantum gyro made by someone else; based on what I'm seeing in this thread, you'd absolutely want the quantum gyro. The MEMS sensors are the first bottleneck, not the clock. Hence your bolded sentence is factually wrong.