The coolest things for the coolest phones
For some reason, Nokia have added some footage to their S60 Touch UI demo video.
The clip is very ‘lifestyle photography’, with lots of doing aspirational things in parks and tilting your head all the way back to laugh at your glamorous friend’s jokes. It does show off some nice-looking UI code, however. It’s all very iPhone, obviously, but still has that Nokia feel.
The web browser looks great, and the way apps launch with a little zoom animation looks very slick indeed.
As many iPhone early-adopters have noted, touchscreens are prone to being covered in greasy fingerprints after even light use. Obviously, someone at Nokia has realised this and decided to ‘leverage’ the phone+dabs combination by patenting a novel use for fingerprint recognition.
Nokia’s patent details not only a method of using a touch-sensitive display as a fingerprint scanner, but also a way of associating unique actions with the prints from different fingers.
Swiping your index finger over the screen could open your contacts list, say, and then a quick smear from your thumb might send an email. Perhaps you could expand the list of shortcuts by using your toes - who knows? At this stage it really is too early to tell.
Quite how practical this would be in action remains to be seen (particularly if you try doing it one-handed) but it one-ups Apple, and surely that is the main thing.
Researchers at Glasgow University have come up with a novel way of interacting with your phone, giving it a shake to feel what is ‘inside’ it.
Their software - Shoogle - uses the motion sensors found in (e.g.) a Nokia N95 to detect when the phone is being shaken and then gives audio and tactile feedback using a combination of the vibrating motor and speakers.
For example, if the phone is low on power, Shoogle can make it feel as though it has a small amount of liquid ‘juice’ sloshing around inside. The software can also make it feel as though there are a different number of balls rattling inside the phone according to how many text messages are waiting to be read.
Shoogle is just a research project at the moment, but the release of Nokia’s Sensor Framework API means that we should be seeing more stuff like this in the wild in the coming months.
