The folks from the Nokia Research Center in Germany are working on a very exciting prospect called the “noBounds”. The project aims to provide a low-power solution for mobile users to extend Smartphone and Internet Tablet screens and project them to higher resolution external displays such as high definition TV’s, projectors and near-to-eye displays (NED). Via USB or WLAN the project aims to let those devices output video at Full HD (1920×1080p) - 30 FPS. This opens up tremendous possibilities, currently TV out capable phones such as the N95, N82 can only output at QVGA resolution (apart from the Gallery) and the ability to output at HD will certainly make the the current smartphone a portable computer.
Although now much is known about how this will work, one big positive is that all that is required for it to work is a software update. The Application is currently running on a N810 Maemo Internet Tablet and apparently uses very little battery. Internet Tablet Talk received an email announcement which you can find after the break.
Apple’s iPhone made a big deal of its positional awareness and it the implications the embedded sensor had for the interface. You rotate the phone and then in SOME applications you can use the phone in the landscape orientation.
Nobody is taking note of the fact that in order to be seen as a native application in the S60 version 3 platform, an application is recommended to support both of the orientations, portrait and landscape.
If you fast forward a little, you can see that Nokia starting implementing accelerometers in their phones before the outside world knew the complete details of the iPhone. From that point onwards, the accelerometer had been under utilized and assigned only one unimportant task. Orienting photos taken from the camera so that they are shown right way up. Putting a technology with so much potential on a sort of backburner was, in my opinion either a mistake or a planned risk by Nokia. Maybe they didn’t know how the public would react to such a radical change in the interface and decided to play it safe.
But the saving grace of this whole ordeal was that the sensor is accessible to developers. It was available in the API (Application Programming Interface). An API is how the functionality of something is exposed and how it communicates with external components. Therefore developers can ‘talk’ to the sensor and do various things.
The applications that are using this new sensor are just the tip of iceberg of what’s possible. There is no doubt that there are interesting times ahead. There’s no telling what concoction a brilliant developer will come up with using the GPS, accelerometer, the light sensor and various other doodads.
The first third party application that I knew of is RotateMe. The goal of RotateMe is simple and the usage even simpler. RotateMe uses the input from the sensor to chine the screen orientation so that it’s the right way up. To see how it works just install it, run it and tilt your compatible device.
