We first came across the idea of Gesture Lock on an Apple fanzine site a few months back, but had no idea that it was about to become a reality. What probably happened is that someone who had seen the new Samsung handsets out this week, which sport the feature, just had to talk about it and where better than on a iPhone chat site.
The leap of faith that Apple made by getting to market with touch first, even though handset vendors had talked about it and experimented with it for years, is more impressive the more we see what touch can do. Gesture Lock is for us, definitely. And before someone says that touch is one of the five senses, so how can it be the sixth sense, we know, just excuse us for poetic license.
This idea is that you can touch your handset in a particular way (write the letter Z on it with your finger, or do a backwards U) to get it to do more or less anything. Obviously to unlock it, but also to put it into a particular menu without going through the menuing system. If such a feature was programmable we would immediately re-program our phones to go to silent with an S motion and go back to loud raucous ringing with an R. It would save about 22 menu clicks on our current phones, and that’s assuming that we don’t make a mistake on the way.
So far what Samsung has are two phones, the S5230 and the S5600 both with the new feature, and yes it is programmable and yes it does recognize letters in order to take you to a menu.
The devices will ship in April and May and the S5230 has a 3-inch widescreen QVGA touch screen and finally is a Samsung phone which can recognize music and potentially let you buy it, similar to the Sony TrackID system, but instead of licensing that from Sony, Samsung is using something called Shazam’s Find Music service. The S5600 is an HSDPA version of the phone with a 2.8-inch QVGA screen.
The S5600 also offers something called ‘Photo Contact,’ a way of aligning photos with contacts so that by touching their picture you can call them. Nokia already has something very similar, but all of this is just touch, touch and more touch. Soon phones won’t even have an on switch, just touch the screen and describe a big O for on, on the sleeping screen. We betcha.