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Samsung Launches 3D Movement Recognition Phone
Shuttertalk reports that Samsung have launched the world's first phone equipped with a continuous 3D movement sensor. Movement sensors in mobile phones to date have been limited to slope calculations and applied to some games and bio-related features. The potential is there to do away with the need for complex keypads on mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras and other handheld products. Many functions will be controlled by movement instead of buttons.
*ring ring* Hello! Chen calling. I speak James please! No James here man... Oh! Is this left left right down left right up? What the...
Without tactile feedback, waving fingers in the air and making funny gestures to do things is a waste of time and customers will hate it.
You can use your optical mouse without it touching the tabletop too, but it isn't at all a reasonable way to operate it.
But what happens when you're in the middle of a tech support call and you slap your hand on your head....? Does the phone know to hang up at this point?
Let's see ... I can program my phone to only need two keystrokes to get to functions I use the most often, there are nine available but I only have three programmed because that's all I use. All of my most often called numbers are voice enabled, and I don't have to open the phone to take calls on my blue-tooth handset. This new phone lets me can draw numbers in space, althought I cannot imagine that is easier or faster than using the keys. And I can draw 'Y' or 'N' instead of pressing soft keys.
... nothing to see here....unless you are a gadget freak and want to buy something that will no longer be offered in 6 months due to a lack of interest.
From what I can tell, the only purpose of this is for games. And we all know how successful they have been combining phones with game systems.
Move on
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The article says that the "new technology" uses an accelerometer, yet states: "This technology will do away with the need for complex keypads on mobile phones".
Clearly, they are jumping the gun. What about people on bumpy trains, busses, etc? Granted, it might be an easier means of input for people walking or standing, but for people in cars, trains, etc, etc, It won't work, and clearly won't "do away with" a standard "complex" input keypad.
Though, it is kind of cool to see components like accelerometers finding their way into everything. With modern mobile phones, maybe they'll be programmable for use as a bluetooth wireless "air mouse"? One would only hope the spec would be at least open to mainstream programmers.
Two words: handicapped people. Some people can't type on those classic keypads. Now they can make simple hand gestures to call somebody. For the rest of us, it's just another phone with totally useless features.
To date, movement sensors in mobile phones have been limited to slope calculations and applied to some games and bio-related features. However, the SCH-S310 can recognize continuous movement in 3-dimensional space.
Two technical problems with this that I see.
Accelerometers have accumulation errors that always render them inaccurate. For true accuracy you need an external point of reference.
Consider, your phone senses that it accerates 5 m/s/s for 2 seconds, it can compute its current velocity no problem.
Now in stopping it, sensor error causes it to think it's accerlated -4.9999 m/s/s for 2 seconds. It's stopped, but it thinks it has a nonzero velocity. Not a big deal yet, but over time these errors accumulate, and after a day or two your phone thinks it's cruising along at 500mph. Perhaps a constant decay term on the stored velocity can force the system to tend to zero over the long term.
But a second and bigger issue is that of frame of reference. For many of the applications described here, I don't care how fast my phone is moving with respect to the earth, I care how fast it is moving with respect to me. So if I get in a car in stop and go traffic, how does the phone discriminate that motion from motion I do with my hands? Or what if I'm just walking along trying to edit my phone book with gesture motions and someone steps in front of me and I stop short? bye bye Cindy, guess we won't be going out tonight after all.
Maybe very clever software design can mitigate this problem of discriminating intended from unintended motion, but it's a difficult problem.
1.
User: Hey, look at this!
* User turns around to show friend
User: Bugger. Just a sec.
2.
Executive 1: What if the user is trying to walk and use the phone at the same time? It is, after all, a mobile phone.
Executive 2: Oh yeah, you're right, it's a load of crap isn't it?
Of course, you can't expect the executives to think of problems with their ideas, because that would imply that they were fallible.
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
You have a celphone with a Digital Camera, GPS, a 3D motion sensor, Bluetooth, a two-way radio, and a processor to handle all this plus some dumb games. That's just some shielding and fancy coding away from a guidance system, with optical target recognition, GPS, a backup Inertial Navigation System for areas where GPS is not available, celestial navigation system (just roll the camera over), and short- and medium- range radios. Put two on a drone and you'll get basic flight instruments as well. Now UAVs, Cruise Missiles, and Drug-smuggling drones are in the hands of anyone with a Verizon subscription!