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TOKYO EDGE : Cell phones to shake, rattle and roll
By Martyn Williams

Forget the keypad. Imagine shaking your cell phone to find and dial a number or swinging it through the air to hit an electronic golf ball. Such actions are possible with a new generation of handsets equipped with motion-sensing capabilities that have begun to appear in South Korea and Japan.

One of these new handsets was unveiled on Monday by Vodafone KK in Japan, which took the wraps off a model produced by Sharp Corp.

The V603SH handset will be available from mid-February and can sense five types of movement: linear movement along the X and Y axis and twisting motions (roll, pitch and yaw) in the X, Y and Z axis, said Mikio Inoue, manager of Vodafone KK's consumer product management department. The phone is the first in Japan to offer these motion-sensing features and is also the first with a single chip that can sense five types of movement, he said.

The chip, called the G2 Motion Sensor, is the result of a two-year research project between Vodafone and Aichi Steel Corp. Until now, sensing twisting and linear motions has required separate chips but the new chip combines these functions and is smaller than either of the previous two components, Aichi Steel said.

To popularize the motion-sensing function, Vodafone plans to publish details of a Java API (application programming interface) so that developers can build support for the function into games. On Monday, the company demonstrated two games with such support.

The first, House of The Dead Mobile, is a zombie shoot-em-up game from Sega Corp. The game screen shows the character's point of view and as the player turns, so does the character in the game.

The second game demonstrated was Full Swing! Golf from Taito Corp. In this game the player holds the cell phone in their hands like a golf club and takes a swing to hit the on-screen ball. Users can also program the phone to perform shortcuts by shaking the handset in one of nine different ways. The game posts a warning on screen before each shot reminding the user to avoid hitting nearby people when taking the swing.

Gaming is a key application for the motion sensing system built into some South Korean handsets.

Pantech Co. Ltd.'s PH-S6500 has a built-in fishing game that requires the user to hold the handset as if it were a fishing rod and a racing game in which the handset becomes the steering wheel for the car. The phone went on sale in January in South Korea and costs 451,000 won (US$440), said Koh Eun Sil, a spokeswoman for Pantech in Seoul.

On LG Electronics Inc.'s SV360 handset, which unfolds to look like a handheld game device, you can play a skiing game in which you steer the course, go faster and go slower just by moving the handset around. The phone will go on sale in March or April in South Korea, said LG.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will also start selling its SCH-S310 in March. The phone uses a motion sensor for control functions, such as ending a call by shaking the handset twice or moving forward or back a track in the MP3 player by moving the phone sharply to the left or right. Possible future uses include using the sensor to help reduce blurring caused by camera shake or monitoring changes in health by detecting changes in body movement, the company said.

None of these four handsets are based on the widely used GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular standard and won't be available overseas immediately. However, Samsung will consider adding the function to international models if the user reception in Korea is good.

Posted February 1, 2005 04:17 PM | TrackBack (5)