A trio of DEMOmobile vendors unveiled technologies that might dramatically change users’ interactions with handheld devices, especially cell phones.
Notebook computers, which apart from getting thinner and lighter, are still and have been for years a keyboard, touchpad and folding display. But handhelds remain a fertile field of at times remarkable innovation. That’s probably a result of the fact that handhelds are nothing if not small: small screens, small buttons and wheels, small keypads or keyboards. To make actually using the things worthwhile, designers have to come up with ways to make them easier to use.
Three vendors unveiled some ideas to do just that:
* F-Origin, with software for navigating by tilting and moving the device, and a touch screen that offers “tactile feedback.”
* Mobile Complete, with hardware and software for highly controlled application testing on live cell phones.
* Synaptics, which is adapting its laptop touchpad technology to be used in some unexpected ways on handheld devices.
F-Origin, in Oulu, Finland, created a gravity sensitive technology and software algorithms. The software mimics the motions you would use to view your face with a small handheld mirror: tilting the screen to the right, to see the right hand side of a Web page, tilting down to see the lower part of the page. The motion is very smooth, controlled, and intuitive: you’re able to quickly and easily scan an entire, fullsized Web page.
A cursor appears on screen, acting like a kind of compass, to guide you in relationship to where you are on the page. If it’s a long document, you can “freeze” it in place and scroll down.
The motion control technology can distinguish between your deliberate movements and bumping against the device or shaking it: in the latter cases, the display won’t respond.
The touch screen technology, dubbed HaptiTouch, uses four force detectors, software algorithms and a hard, clear plastic lens, covering a standard LCD touch screen.
The F-Origin software creates tactile feedback: as you press on the hard plastic plate, you can “feel” a button or surface give way under the pressure (some background on haptic technology). “When you touch, you ‘feel something happen’ and then you know you have actually done something,” says Jukka-Pekka Metsävainio, F-Origin’s chairman.
He showed how to browse through an inbox of e-mails by brushing his thumb across the screen, the motion seeming to drag or brush one message away to reveal the next one.
The company is in talks with a handful of device makers and OEMS, who may license one or both technologies and include them in future devices.
Mobile Complete is a San Francisco, Calif., start-up of a type less frequently seen these days: it’s just 18 months old and so far entirely funded by its creators, CTO David Marsyla, and President Faraz Syed.
Both men were frustrated while building mobile applications that had to run on various devices. “Testing ate up over half of the [project] budget every time,” Syed says. Differences in phone features, software, operating systems, networks, all create a nightmarishly complex test environment for programmers.
The company’s hardware and software is intended to dramatically cut those costs by automating the test process for software on smartphones and similar devices.
Each phone is “strapped into” in a specially designed box: without disassembling the phone, electrical connections are made to its buttons, screens, ringers, speakers and other parts. The box is linked by a USB connection to a server running Mobile Complete’s Ensemble server software, which works as a data conduit between the cell phone and the client application, Test Conductor, which runs on a PC.
Test Conductor shows the programmer a highly detailed, interactive image of the phone being tested. Programmers create a set of test scripts, which then automatically exercise the application loaded on the phone, and run regression and other tests. “With the scripts, I can control all the phone’s features,” Marsyla says.
The rig can test any kind of application, from complex applications written in J2ME or BREW to ring tones and screen savers.
One especially powerful feature is being able to test each phone while its active on its “native” cellular network. A programmer in San Francisco can mount a Samsung cell phone that uses a local wireless carrier, but he can also remotely test, via an internet connection to a remote Ensemble server, a Nokia phone on a cellular net in France.
The product set is in beta test, with general release, to three initial customers, at the end of September.
Synaptics http://www.synaptics.com, best known for its ubiquitous notebook touchpads, showed off prototype handsets and PDAs outfitted with the same capacitive sensor technology, dubbed Mobile Touch, but in unexpected ways. The idea is to translate gestures and pressure into scrolling, selecting and navigating a handheld interface.
One cell phone incorporated the solid state pad on its side, replacing a mechanical scroll wheel. Another handset incorporated a circular pad at its base: swirling a fingertip around moved you through a menu of onscreen options, which could be selected the pad. For a built-in camera, the same swirl could zoom in or out on the image.
Working with Samsung, a prototype MP3 player concealed the touch pad under the plastic surface of the device, with LEDs highlighting symbols the various functions, each activated by finger press.
A fourth vendor, MVOEM, has developed proprietary software and hardware tools to design highly customized mobile phones for specific services or subscriber groups. MVOEM recently announced that a company called MobileCare is using the tools to design an inexpensive cell phone, bundled with MobileCare services, for seniors.
