.Dust

After accelerom­e­ter tech­nol­ogy made its appear­ance to the masses it seems that every mobile phone man­u­fac­turer is rush­ing to put the very same bit of hard­ware in their mobile phones.

There a lot of appli­ca­tions that can make use of the accelerom­e­ter to increase the usabil­ity of the prod­ucts or ser­vices and there also some very funny appli­ca­tions that are deliv­ered to end users.

• We have already talked in the past about these funny things:
• You can use your accelerom­e­ter as a mouse.
• You can snooze your mobile phone alarm clock by sim­ply shak­ing it.
• You can read sms mes­sages by sim­ply mov­ing your phone.
• You can silent an incom­ing call by tap­ping the phone.
• … and a lot of other dif­fer­ent things.

Accord­ing to my opin­ion we are going to make an exces­sive use of this technology.

Just to be clear I am con­vinced of the fact the mobile phone usabil­ity can be really improved by this tech­nol­ogy but I also think that it should be used in savvy way.

A sim­ple exam­ple. Some of the new Sony­Er­ic­s­son hand­sets have pre­loaded a very designed java game called Need For Speed Pro Street. It a great game, indeed. If you want you can use the mobile accelerom­e­ter to drive you car. Well, I found out that turn­ing the mobile phone too much on the right or left hand­side makes com­pletely hide the dis­play mak­ing your game expe­ri­ence quite frus­trat­ing. I see two dif­fer­ent prob­lems here. The first one is the fact the typ­i­cal LCD dis­play can viewed clearly up to a cer­tain angle and the sec­ond is the fact that the accelerom­e­ter sen­si­bil­ity may be too low.

To be fair with Sony­Er­ic­s­son I have to say that I was try­ing this on an engi­neer­ing sam­ple and the real user expe­ri­ence may greatly dif­fer from com­mer­cial devices.

Any­way it is quite clear that when deal­ing with this tech­nol­ogy you need to care­fully eval­u­ate the user expe­ri­ence before launch­ing any prod­uct or ser­vice on the market.

One last word about those mobile phones that will let you run appli­ca­tion in back­ground. If these appli­ca­tions will make use of the accelerom­e­ter they will need to imple­ment dif­fer­ent “ges­tures” to inter­act with the users. No stan­dard exists at all and this may lead to a very bad user expe­ri­ence mak­ing the end user think that any­thing is work­ing on their handsets.

Finally, do you remem­ber the early times of blue­tooth head­set when you could see peo­ple walk­ing around talk­ing to them­selves? We all thought that they were sort of crazy peo­ple. Using the accelerom­e­ter tech­nol­ogy we will see the very same peo­ple danc­ing with their mobile phone to answer a call or read an SMS message.

Note: Pho­tos from Piu­tus phostream. Someright rights reserved from the author.

Related posts:

1. Uncon­ven­tional Use Of Your Mobile Phone Accelerometer
2. Prompt mad­ness
3. The iPhone Effect
4. Do You Still Make Voice Calls?
5. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star