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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."
How about 3 day battery life with 6 hours talk time?
How about good, clear calls?
How about not magically losing signal when I walk in to another room?
Yeah tilt it and you cannot read it anymore. That won't cause more frustration on the highway.
Gits.
But he adds that consumers will have to be convinced that the technology is useful.
How about stop all the crap 'features' that people have to be convinced are useful, and just get the damn things to work...
(blissfully, I don't really care, because I remain cellphone anchor-free)
Is is only me, but I'm surpised every time some company comes up with some new feature for a cellphone, and they demonstrate it by saying it might come in handy when playing a game? Every new phone is marketeered by saying how much games it has, how much ringtones, how easily you can change the cover,...
I can't think of a good thing I can do with a phone with a gyroscope in it right now. I assume that anyone can come up with some basic telephone feature that is still missing. One I can come up with is "if busy, present a callback function (Call back in 30 seconds? Yes/No)". Another one is "answer and delete message".
Oh boy, if only I would design phones...
They keep trying to use this "tilt" technology somewhere. I first saw it at PC Expo several years ago (but before it became "techxNY" or whatever) - It was a SD card add on for a palm V. They were making a big deal out of scrolling maps with it. I demoed it, and tried to be polite about it, but the fact is that it is useless.
There is much less control in tilting a palm while trying to watch the screen scroll, and then tilting it to level again to read the map - and once you tilt it level, you have to switch the toggle to stop it scrolling if you tilt it up to look at it.
It reminds me of those games where you have a marble and have to make it fall in the hole in the middle of a big plate - you always overshoot the hole and end up on the other end.
It's a dumb way to solve a problem that has already been solved via scroll bars and/or buttons.
For some reason you Americans (though eminently logical in most areas) persist in believing that you live in a free market. A free market is one where government does not choose the winners but defines the rules and allows any player to compete. The USA just does not work like this: most significant industries are incredibly regulated, and telecoms is one of these. Energy is another.
The USA's "free market" is anything but. For a really free market in telecoms, you have to look to countries where there is no anti-competitive parastate monopoly.
Amazingly, also the countries with the cheapest and often best mobile phone services.
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..can't you see the interactive applications of tilt/movement of portable devices that also have a vibrating ringtone function.
I'm just saying it seems the sex trades are the first to jump into new technology. (I'm still waiting for the multi-camera function of DVDs to appear in anything but adult entertainment)
Did I mention they also have cameras??
As a guitar player, I can understand the nuances involved in motion patterns, control, differentiation of player/user, etc. But in practice, tilt control provides no real value. It requires you to change the orientation of the device to provide input, even though your primary method of feedback is dependant on the orientation of the device.
;)
Imagine if you typed into your word processor by placing your hands in the middle of the document on your screen and typing on a virtual keyboard - you can't see what you are typing until you stop, look, and then you have to fix mistakes blind as well. It just doesn't work, even though a virtual on screen keyboard has instant geek appeal.
Besides, the nuances you are talking about don't really apply to the cell phone/pda market - that is about getting information into and out of the device as quickly and accurately as possible. subtle wrist flicks and tilting are not the way to do that. I can't actually think of an application (except perhaps security/authentication) that would benefit from nuanced control in this medium. Maybe if they created a virtual theramin or something... but talk about a niche market.
If you want to spend your phone real estate on a screen, do two things:
1) Voice dialing. When done right, this is a killer feature.
2) Touch Screen. Scroll maps and such by simply placing your finger (thumb?) on the screen and "pulling" it.
the physical orientation of the device in the real world should have no bearing on the behavior of the systems software.
While this could be done with a gyroscope, that would be an incredible waste of energy (motor+cellphonebatteries=BAD). What I hope they mean is a simple spherical mercury switch.
Old stuff indeed, the Microsoft Freestyle Pro gamepad is five years old and has a very similar feature, but instead of a gyro, it uses an acceleration sensor (ADXL202) to sense the angle of the controller relative to the earth's gravitational field. A gyro is actually not a good idea for this kind of control because it can only sense relative rotation angles (i.e. you have no zero point).
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
This may be true but it's close to meaningless when it comes to the market and quality of coverage. The great debate over CDMA/TDMA/whatever is fun for telco engineers but the public wants to know only:
1. does it work in my area?
2. is it reasonably reliable?
3. is it economical?
And most of the mobile networks in the USA fail on these grounds for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with technology. I remember trying to use my GSM in the States, frustrated to find that outside the airports and a few major cities, nothing worked.
Mobile telecoms in the US are handicapped by the regulations surrounding fixed lines: in most European countries mobile phones outstrip fixed lines because they are as cheap and much more useful. In the US, the "local calls are basically free" regulations mean mobile phones can't compete fairly.
This kind of issue is much, much more important than the relative merits of CDMA, TDMA and their variants.
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