This morning I am trying to forget that the US has the new SimCity already whilst I have to wait until the 8th here in the UK. So I’ve been reading about the new Galaxy S IV and some of the rumours about it. The most interesting of which is that the phone will automatically scroll down as your eyes reach the bottom.
Cool eh? In theory anyway. This sort of thing would be absolutely amazing, if it works properly. For the feature to be more than a gimmick it will need to be seriously fine tuned. Which I’m sure is more than within Samsung’s capabilities, and isn’t really a worry. It’s not going to end up like Siri which can only understand people with an american accent, as all eyes are the same. So functionality shouldn’t be a concern for it but as with all these amazing new tech advances it is. There’s always the possibility that who ever is releasing the first will balls it up and the world will dismiss the tech forever (Or until Apple find it and release a polished version).
But I can forget about that, my issue is that it’s on a phone. Let’s say they nail this, and eye scrolling works a treat. Users will literally have to hold their thumbs out of the way to read the screen, why not just use those? The phone is the worst place to showcase this! put it in a laptop, or even a TV and it becomes amazing, put it on a phone and users start actually having to try to use it. Admittedly it’s not much effort to move your thumb (although I have quite fat thumbs… But that’s a different problem) it’s still effort. Which is ridiculous.
I’m constantly hearing about how SmartTV’s are the future etc. So surely that leads to web activity from the TV, eye scrolling would make this actually worth doing. Anyone that’s tried to view a webpage on a PS3 should realise how much of a pain it can be to use the web on a TV screen without a mouse, and who wants a mouse in their living room? The more I write this the more convinced I am that this would be amazing, voice commands for input fields and eye recognition for control. I want that TV. Make that Samsung.
Anyway, I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether the new Galaxy S will do this or not, if it does it’ll be a cool feature, but I hope they can push on from there and it doesn’t stay fixed to the phone. As someone that eats lunch at my desk, eye scrolling would be a god send on my laptop, so I can only hope it at least makes it there.
On a side note, whilst I’m on the subject of phones. Does anyone else wonder how long Samsung and Apple can go on with the numbering? It’s interesting to point out that a Google image search for “Galaxy S IV” starts returning Star Wars episode IV images. But when is enough enough and they decide “sod it, we need a new name Galaxy S XIV isn’t as catchy as we hoped”. I realise whilst I write this that any name change would probably come as the device starts to fail, or at least lose traction by whatever metric the companies are using to show success. I wonder who will cave first? Having heard some of Apples other names for the iPhone they were playing with I hope for their sake it’s not them
