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Gyroscope Gives CellPhones 'Tilt Control'
Paul Stamatiou writes "You can now control cellphone activities by simply tilting it.
"If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road, you do that by tilting," says company spokesman Jan Ahrenbring. The tilting technique can also be used to sweep large virtual pages across the phone's screen, which acts as window on the information."
the technology used in this case might be more advanced (gyroscope), but the idea of tilting the phone to activate a function or control something isn't new. i had a casio watch many years back that would automatically turn on the backlight for a few seconds if you lifted up your wrist to look at it. i'm not sure this is a good thing though...just one more thing to keep drivers who shouldn't be on the road in the first place distracted.
Perhaps you're living in the wrong country. My Nokia GSM has more than 6 hours' talk time, the battery runs for ten days or so, and reception is crystal clear everywhere I go.
All it is really missing is motion control. That way I can answer the phone simply by picking it up, hold a call by putting the phone down, and scroll through my address list by shaking the phone like a lunatic instead of clicking those damn arrow keys.
My guess is: if the rocker control is cheap and easy to hook up to the UI, it will be a natural and useful extension to the way we use phones.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Is it like this or this or this And this goes back to 1999. Ahh but its on a phone now. Quick, I'd better patent it before someone else does. Bah.. Old idea. Just a new application.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Also from this months Stuff Magazine there is a perview of this phone on the inside back cover. One other funky thing it can do is that if you rotate it 90 degrees it will actually flip the screen orientation
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Get educated. CDMA is much more advanced than the TDMA technology that's in the GSM standard. Besides, you want GSM? Get T-Mobile. You see how easy that is when you have a choice?
Well, I don't know about patenting, but there's been hardware and software to do tilt sensing on a Palm for a while. Sure, it's not exactly common, but it's out there. There's even a game or two that use it.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I'm not that familiar with CDMA, so I cannot comment on it being more advanced, but GSM is a combination of FDMA and TDMA, not only TDMA.
"The USA just does not work like this: most significant industries are incredibly regulated, and telecoms is one of these. Energy is another."
Energy and telecoms are regulated out of necessity. It makes sense for one company to run power lines and one company to run phone lines. Having 10 companies compete would be nice, but it is not likely to happen. So regulation is how the industry is kept from price-gouging. The power blackout in New York was caused by a (British owned) power company that neglected upgrades and maintenence - this happened because of deregulation, not because of regulation.
Wireless telecoms don't work the same way. That's why they are much less regulated in the US.
And, frankly, we have the best, cheapest mobile phone services. Yes, we have the odd "recieving party pays", and we pay a monthly fee. But for my $40 a month ($30 without the data), I get:
- Unlimited calling on nights, weekends, and to other phones on the same network
- 600 minutes to use anytime else
- Unlimited SMS and 1xRTT (144kbit data), not billed by the messege or the kilobyte
- Free roaming in a country roughly 3x the size and with as many people as the EU
- Free long-distance, anwhere within the same area
My friends all have the same provider, so I can call them whenever I want, for as long as I want, wherever I am in the country. Now, is coverage as good as it is in Europe? No. But all the major roads are covered, as well as all towns and cities with more than a couple of thousand people. And it's CDMA, too. I thought that my GSM phone sounded good until I got CDMA. No static, no wierd artifacts, no hiss. And data service with 3x the bandwidth and 1/2 the latency of GPRS.
Prefer GSM? Fine. T-Mobile, AT&T, or Cingular will be happy to have your business. They even have roaming agreements so you can roam (free, of course) onto other GSM networks in the US. Prefer CDMA? Verizon and Sprint will be happy to give you service.
Look at the progression of the US wireless industry:
1983: First (analog) cellular service in US begins
1992: First GSM service in Europe
1995: First GSM service in USA, First CDMA service in US
1999: First "No Roaming, No Long Distance" promotion (AT&T OneRate)
2000: First "Free Nights/Weekends" Promotion (Verizon), First "Others on the same network" promotion
2001: AT&T Goes GSM
2002: LEAP introduces Cricket, $32 unlimited calling, but only works in your home area.
2002: Sprint introduces unlimited 1xRTT
2003: Cingular introduces "rollover", lets you keep unused minutes for 1 year after they are (not) used.
2003: Free Nights/Weekends, Free Roaming, Free Long Distance, Same network promotions are the standard. So is unlimited data.
So, are we really that far behind? CDMA, GSM, 1xRTT? Our wireless system works differently. Yes, the person recieving the call pays (with plan minutes (or with unlim. night/wknd/same service), but the person calling doesn't pay (no $0.25 per minute; it's just another local call, or, if the cellphone number is in a different area code, it's $0.03 a minute). It's partially because the US had cellphones in 1983. It's not "worse" just because it doesn't work like the European system.
Firstly, do we really want to be putting more mercury into the environment, even in its safer metallic form?
More importantly though, you can make an accelerometer using a single silicon chip. At last year's UIST I saw a tilt keyboard which used the standard silicon accelerometer.