Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
(Image: Samsung)
Until now, Samsung's smartphone patent battles with Apple have focused on who owns inventive rights to surface-bound gestures such as "pinch-to-zoom" and end-of-scroll page bounceback. But last night Samsung moved the battle into what seems like clear blue waters - with a move into the third dimension.
Launched in New York, the Galaxy S 4 Android phone will give users control of certain functions with "no need for finger-touch activation", says Samsung, which is based in Suwon, South Korea. Top of such features looks like being Smart Scroll, which senses where you are looking on a page to automatically scroll the browser, emails or Twitter timelines up or down.
"It detects your eyes and recognises the movement of your wrist, and then scrolls the pages up or down accordingly," says Samsung. But it is not clear that true eye-tracking is being used - mashable.com reports that it is in fact?a type of face and tilt recognition. Whatever it is, it seems to work.
A related facial function is Smart Pause, which stops video running when you look away from the phone screen and starts it up again when you're back. That could be annoying if you're looking away from the boring bits on purpose - but hopefully it is a user-activated trick. Catch a demo care of the BBC here - at 42 seconds in.
The Galaxy S 4 also includes a function called Air View, in which you can hover a finger above a tweet, say, to preview the content it links to. And Air Gesture lets you switch music tracks or advance to the next video by simply swishing your hand dismissively above the screen.
Depending on how they have been physically realised, these features could lead to more patent battles: Apple has applied for patents on "hovering" above touchscreens to gain extra functions from the buttons below, as New Scientist revealed in this 2008 post.
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