I can remember very well, the first day I got to know about an Accelerometer on a phone, that was the Wattery screensaver for 5500 on the Psiloc website. At that time I was wondering why such a thing in a phone, only to work with that Screensaver? But then there was a video uploaded by Samir revealing the new Rotateme 2.o with auto rotation, for a while I thought it was a fake, then one by one new apps that are working with the accelerometer started to show up. But I had to just watch the videos and read reviews on this, cos my N80 doesn’t have a built-in accelerometer, until the good friends at WOM world sent me the N95.The inclusion of Accelerometer on N95 and not announcing it on the release of N95 indicates that even nokia guys haven’t thought that this will gain so much popularity, when the iphone just started get on with similar technology. Probably they have integrated this in order to use it with the n-gage platform which means they are having long term plans for the N-series, that’s a good news which indicates that the N-series will not die off in the near future. So let’s get on with some of the softwares I used on my N95 to test the use of Accelerometer,
1. Activity Monitor
This concept is good in combining mobiles with health and sport related matters, where still people are unaware about how powerful these small tech-Chunks. I gave a try and it worked accurately some time but not at all, I think the detection of motion depends on both the height and the length of the steps which varies from one person to another. In this manner it is possible to come up with faulty results but it very nice to have such experience and get some basic idea on how much energy you spend and how much calories you burn in your daily walking. Also you can measure the distance you travel, which P found surprisingly high than I thought to be(Happy to know) This application is basic in functionality offering only the step counting and I think its better to make it integrate it into sports tracker so they will make up a good app with the use of both GPS and Accelerometer.(Don’t know whether this is already in the Sports tracker cos I’m not using it since the GPS services are in its basic level at our region)
2. Rotateme 2.0
Samir is a great contributor to the s60 platform with his revolutionary ideas,he is like the soul owner of the Accelerometer Who should have the full credit for bringing the it to life.The rotate of was a major attractive application came up for the devices support both landscape and portrait screen orientations, at its initial states but with the Accelerometer support in its version 2 made it a real successor. It’s very convenient to have such application with all the adjustable Reactivity and sensitivity controlling. Especially the hotkey activation is very useful when it comes to web browsing and reading documents. Most of all it brings the screen back to the portrait mode when the device is slide down to reveal the multimedia keys, which was a real annoying thing before the time of rotateme.
3. Nokmote
This is a amazing and though it’s in the development state it offers a great chance to experience the real use of Accelerometer. This is great to watch slideshows in a natural way without pressing any navi keys. And also a great way to navigate through the menus. It is very appealing to watch the way it works on the multimedia menu,music player and the gallery ,and also the “shake” it uses to select an application. Still it has some improvements to gain and I’m sure in the future samir will work on it.
Apart from those the ShakeMe is also very handy and customizable app to get done more than one task by shaking the device. And a another app that helps to hang up or mute incoming calls and for alarm users is the flipsilent. So we will see more and more of these kinds of Accelerometer related applications and wonder how long will it take for nokia to get the full use of it with integrated applications, like they add the autorotation for the N82?And the future where there is no space allocations for keys on the phones……
Update:There is something new, about to Spawn on this generation,But sadly I wont be able to try it,cos by the time of its release my N95 would be back at WOM world.So check this out,