Related
Firstly, I've been following the leaks so far, and so I don't want to hear, oh there won't be a multitouch. The bottom line is, we don't know what the final product will be.
Secondly, it goes without saying, that I support any efforts by MS to incorporate capacitative screens. Currently, there are two known and upcoming solutions to replace the stylus, one an RF pen (a stylus that should work with cap. screens- google it!) and a solution that MS has recently invested in, called something like N-trig.
The purpose of this thread is to discuss, and make content those who are against multitouch if it comes to 6.5, or for that matter, 7.
Now, the main argument against multitouch, is that it is against single-handed usage. Here I will list why that is a moot/null/void argument:
- Using the iPhone as an example firstly (and pretty much throughout but it is not due to me having a liking for it, rather I hate it, but I hope to convey a more profound message), though there is argument over the pinch gesture in Safari (their internet browser), the double-tap to zoom is still available. So, the double-tap that we are used to in Opera, is also in Safari. So one can have it both ways. So, to sum up this point, devs would need to make sure that their programs are made for single handed usage, but that multitouch offers a different (and as some would argue, more enhanced) method of using the phone. So single-handed usage is still there, basically.
- Some games, require pressing of more than one button simultaneously. Now if buttons A, B and C are onscreen and are only viable via touch entry, then we're screwed once again as only one given button can be pressed at one time. If you're a gamer, you will know how big a limitation this is to your phone. It hurts in so many scenarios. If you're not into games, or your games are limited to puzzles: trust me, this is a biggie!
- A similar and relevant point; phones like Touch HD bear the brunt of lacking multitouch, as they don't even have a D-pad for games. So all buttons onscreen (D-pad inclusive) can only be pressed one-at-a-time!
- Whether you like this app or not, it demonstrates that some apps simply cannot do without multitouch. Why put limitations? If you want to argue it is against single-touch usage, then press one button at a time !
- Another app that is somewhat heartwarming . I've used it on an acquaintance's iPhone, and it's nice to swirl two of your fingers through the pond making multiple ripples. Again, just use single touch if you're against double ripples .
- Text entry for those of us that type at lightning speed would be hindered where we are required to press one button right next to the next one in quick succession. Why put this limitation?
- I will add more here onwards if something comes to mind. Maybe. Maybe not.
So all in all, single handed usage can still be there, and MS can enforce this in their SkyStore (app store equivalent), though granted it could be difficult. But most developers would do this, as most do what their customers want, not what I, the dev want.
LASTLY, this is not a WM bashing thread if you think like that, so stop hating! This is for improvements only!
Just to let you know...it's not all M$'s fault..Mostly HTC and the companys that make the devices. Just look at the omnia. It has a capactive touchscreen.
Good Points, and just because WM6.5 has Mutlitouch available doesn't mean devs or phone builders would HAVE to use it.
I'm a big fan of "many options."
Side Note: Moved to General Discussion.
Kraize said:
Just to let you know...it's not all M$'s fault..Mostly HTC and the companys that make the devices. Just look at the omnia. It has a capactive touchscreen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is this truly true ? If so, why doesn't Samsung advertise it as much? Also, doesn't the small buttons become difficult to use?
JimmyMcGee said:
Good Points, and just because WM6.5 has Mutlitouch available doesn't mean devs or phone builders would HAVE to use it.
I'm a big fan of "many options."
Side Note: Moved to General Discussion.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is precisely my point! The only little niggle is that devs should make sure that productivity tools allow single handed usage as well. One way would be to enforce this through the SkyStore. Another would be to let the magic happen itself.
I really want to see what people will say against my strong defence of multitouch. Come on people!
It will raise the cost of the devices (both due to the much more expensive screen AND the need for a special, larger stylus) and create a further layer of incompatibility between WM devices (those with multi-touch and those without).
Surur
surur said:
and create a further layer if incomparability between WM devices (those with multi-touch and those without).
Surur
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Which is why everyone should have to buy a new device when Windows Mobile 7 is released.
Seems people are forgeting WM6.5 is more like Vista, a stop gap before the better OS ie Windows 7
Why WM6.5 does not have mltitouch ?
I will try to answer this question.
The big hardware manifacturers are in the begining of producin multitouch capable phones (you all know that you need multitouch capable digitizer in order to be able to use multitouch). Microsoft communicated with manifacturers and they were not ready with such devices, which is the reason multitouch to be reserved for windows mobile 7.
Seems people are forgeting WM6.5 is more like Vista, a stop gap before the better OS ie Windows 7
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Totally agree
I see no real benefit in multi-touch on small screen. granted, in games with on devices with minimal input buttons, but until device manufactures actually start releasing 3D drivers for the devices the point about gaming isn't of much substance because there will only be mediocre games.
I don't know what the masses want but I see little benefit in it on screens that one can stretch the thumb from bottom left of the device and reach the top right.
I rather draw a counter clockwise circle to zoom and a clockwise to zoom out.
the real benefit is in the screen response, not the multi-touch. aside from gaming, tell me what other real benefit is there? because I don't see it.
Text entry for those of us that type at lightning speed would be hindered where we are required to press one button right next to the next one in quick succession. Why put this limitation?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think this depends on the sip you're using and have no reliance on multi-touch capabilities. I see myself as a very fast typist and this is thanks to the sip I'm using.
do this, ask your friend to do this with his iPhone: press 2 keys at the same time while typing the word "Quilts", so your friend would type it like this "Qu" then "il" then "ts" and tell us what's the result. I am pretty curious as to what the results will be. I would ask my girl to do it but she's at work now.
I have a simple question about Android in which I have not found the simple answer to... (Although I think I know, I just want some clarification). I recently switched over to Windows Phone 7 because of various reasons, I will not name them here as that is an entirely different subject, however one of the reasons i switched was because of overall responsiveness of the OS. Why does Android's touch response feel sooo clunky? Yeah transitions and app launches are nice and quick, but I mean like pinch-to-zoom, and scrolling... I have played with the latest and greatest both rooted (with and without custom rom) and non rooted (with or without OEM UI), Motorola Xoom, Atrix 4G whatever is being claimed latest and greatest. But no matter what they all have the same touch response lag no matter what. This, believe it or not, is a major deal breaker for me, and before the majority of you speak, I'll speak for you; "why is something so simple and small, barely even considered a nuisance, be such a nuisance?" for me, i love fluidity, so, it just is. At this question however i do retort; if its such a "simple" or "small" nuisance, why can't it "simply" be coded to feel as fluid as Windows Phone 7, or iOS?
Luisraul924 said:
I have a simple question about Android in which I have not found the simple answer to... (Although I think I know, I just want some clarification). I recently switched over to Windows Phone 7 because of various reasons, I will not name them here as that is an entirely different subject, however one of the reasons i switched was because of overall responsiveness of the OS. Why does Android's touch response feel sooo clunky? Yeah transitions and app launches are nice and quick, but I mean like pinch-to-zoom, and scrolling... I have played with the latest and greatest both rooted (with and without custom rom) and non rooted (with or without OEM UI), Motorola Xoom, Atrix 4G whatever is being claimed latest and greatest. But no matter what they all have the same touch response lag no matter what. This, believe it or not, is a major deal breaker for me, and before the majority of you speak, I'll speak for you; "why is something so simple and small, barely even considered a nuisance, be such a nuisance?" for me, i love fluidity, so, it just is. At this question however i do retort; if its such a "simple" or "small" nuisance, why can't it "simply" be coded to feel as fluid as Windows Phone 7, or iOS?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I will try to answer since I've been using android before. android now as I believe is still in development stage. especially because it started from open source, where many developers get involved to participate in android development. unlike windows or the IOS platform. development is only done by the company itself through microsoft and apple. Except for third-party application development
android is a system (for run smoothly) with very powerful hardware. so that the source code would require a very complicated of encoding. Its a very difficult job to sync between the needs of software with hardware which is available. and vice versa. in an application such as pinching and scrolling there is more than one command which contains a lot of code. and should be remembered that this is a system. which are all related to each other for the overall operations to run smoothly based on the minimum demand of the hardware required. if there is one character in which is wrong of encoding or difference may cause the application not running properly.
for high-end android device such as Xoom, atrik 4G I'm sure the hardware is not an issue. I'm sure it was more caused by the complexity of encoding in one of the applications listed that is running inside in the whole operating system, making it not running smoothly. because so many commands which must be running at the same time is what make pinching and scrolling activity to be "clunky" like you said. you can differentiate by turning off the internet connection or turn off unnecessary applications running in the background. But I'm sure very soon android operating system will have a system which is more stable and efficient in encoding such as those held by the windows or apple.
My answer may be added by other members of the more expert in these matters. as a newbie, i am just trying to help based on the knowledge I had acquired over the years. CMIIW
Yeah I figured it would be something like that, I owned a Droid (1st gen.) and I had multiple setups from completely stock to my favorite, Cyanogenmod (always on the latest stable build, although I've already flashed CM7 RC2 and its probably the fastest its ever been at 800 MHz) everything was perfect except; scrolling and pinch-to-zoom. The scrolling is almost there, it actually lags for a bit but if I leave my finger on the page, it locks on to that position and stays there, but once I lift it to continue scrolling down or up it'll lag a bit again. The pinch zooming is just horrible no matter what. Unfortunately, given the nature of open source, and coding software in general, there is no such thing as "finished" software, so since this is open source, and the software is basically written to run on "nearly" whatever device you choose to flash it on, i don't think that problem will ever be solved. However, if Android does eventually reach that richness of responsiveness, then i will more than gladly switch back.
issues of a system running smoothly is different from one device to another device.
due to the wide variety of different android devices that causes the emergence of issues on the system stability. it was time to google as the main developer sets the standards for the development of next android os. while there is no standardization of hardware is set by google. it will be very difficult for other developers to write code/adjust performance in the operating system command. all this time writing code is must be adapted to the device from vendor itself. This will bring up the differences result of writing the code on other devices from another vendors (competitors). so if we running bencmark test or head to head test on both devices from different vendor the result will not be the same.
and if there will be a standarization set by google i believed it will not againts a spirit of an open source
I think the hardware that the WinCE (well...the shoe still fits) and Android phones are made on is essentially the same, in terms of the CPU power, the actual CPUs, the memory and the various other systems (graphics, etc.). Maybe not identical but overlapping classes and performance.
I haven't played with the new WinPhones but have noticed that every Android phone, no matter how fast and how "bare" factory, sometimes goes out to lunch. Apparently that's just the way the OS is written, it sometimes goes off to do other things internally (loading code? checking hardware states?) and you can't do anything except wait for it to come back.
But then again, almost every OS does that at times, including the main Windows OSes. That's just how they are done these days. If you had a cell phone fifteen year ago, you could turn it on and dial NOW. With any of the new cell phones? Can you do a cold power up and have a functioning phone in less than 30 seconds? Uh, no. But they call that progress, because you rarely have to power them off these days.
Every OS has tradeoffs, if the WinPhone makes you happier, by all means do it.
Rred said:
I think the hardware that the WinCE (well...the shoe still fits) and Android phones are made on is essentially the same, in terms of the CPU power, the actual CPUs, the memory and the various other systems (graphics, etc.). Maybe not identical but overlapping classes and performance.
I haven't played with the new WinPhones but have noticed that every Android phone, no matter how fast and how "bare" factory, sometimes goes out to lunch. Apparently that's just the way the OS is written, it sometimes goes off to do other things internally (loading code? checking hardware states?) and you can't do anything except wait for it to come back.
But then again, almost every OS does that at times, including the main Windows OSes. That's just how they are done these days. If you had a cell phone fifteen year ago, you could turn it on and dial NOW. With any of the new cell phones? Can you do a cold power up and have a functioning phone in less than 30 seconds? Uh, no. But they call that progress, because you rarely have to power them off these days.
Every OS has tradeoffs, if the WinPhone makes you happier, by all means do it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree with you, I do like both OS's for their own benefits, currently I do like WP7 better than Android and keeps me "happy". However if you notice; that's not my prime motive in starting this thread, I didn't come here to say one is better than the other. I just want to know why those two simple things (scrolling and pinch zooming) are not fluid on Android. You can't use the excuse that it's different hardware because Microsoft is playing that trick too. You can't use the "its busy doing other things" excuse either, while WP7 doesn't have multi-tasking, iOS does (somewhat) so it can go "do" something else but will still feel fluid. In a multi-OEM environment it is up to the OEM to optimize it for the device it runs on, which is why it baffles me that even Sense and MotoBlur and others make performance decline a bit and still has the lag. Shouldn't it be the opposite?
Nothing? So no one can tell me why Android's responsiveness (scrolling, pinch-zooming) sucks?
Luisraul924 said:
Nothing? So no one can tell me why Android's responsiveness (scrolling, pinch-zooming) sucks?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The answer is quite simple (and the above replies are miles off the mark). Hardware acceleration.
WP7 has it, Android doesn't.
FloatingFatMan said:
The answer is quite simple (and the above replies are miles off the mark). Hardware acceleration.
WP7 has it, Android doesn't.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So the hardware acceleration runs throughout the entire OS? I thought it was mainly just the XNA and Silverlight stuff that was accelerated (I do believe those are different than native OS code, as Microsoft isnt allowing developers to write apps with native code. Future compatibility issues I guess)
Of course it's the entire OS. Why do you think MS's minimum spec stipulations are so high? This is what Windows Mobile was so plagued with, and how MS fixed that problem.
Luis-
"So the hardware acceleration runs throughout the entire OS?"
It isn't so much that the hardware acceleration runs in the OS, but that the hardware itself has certain routines built into it, on the firmware level, so the OS can just call those routines instead of trying to calculate them.
To oversimplify a bit, for instance, a hardware accelerator for "zoom in" might be programmed into the video chip system to automatically tell it "take the 50 pixels around this spot and blow up up to 250 pixels, refresh screen" where the OS would be saying "OK, let's take this spot, draw a square with a 50 pixel radius around it, now let's take each of those pixels and transpose it over twice the radius and go fill..." sending a long slow string of commands, each computed by the CPU.
When the CPU can offload all of that into a simple "zoom" command to the video chip, the CPU is now free to do other things. Like, respond to your next input, or push the next menu onto the display.
When you have ironclad control over the hardware--it can be a great way to make systems faster. And more stable.
Rred said:
Luis-
"So the hardware acceleration runs throughout the entire OS?"
It isn't so much that the hardware acceleration runs in the OS, but that the hardware itself has certain routines built into it, on the firmware level, so the OS can just call those routines instead of trying to calculate them.
To oversimplify a bit, for instance, a hardware accelerator for "zoom in" might be programmed into the video chip system to automatically tell it "take the 50 pixels around this spot and blow up up to 250 pixels, refresh screen" where the OS would be saying "OK, let's take this spot, draw a square with a 50 pixel radius around it, now let's take each of those pixels and transpose it over twice the radius and go fill..." sending a long slow string of commands, each computed by the CPU.
When the CPU can offload all of that into a simple "zoom" command to the video chip, the CPU is now free to do other things. Like, respond to your next input, or push the next menu onto the display.
When you have ironclad control over the hardware--it can be a great way to make systems faster. And more stable.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Great answer. Makes sense, thanks. Now given that this is an Android section lets talk more on that, will it ever be possible to have hardware acceleration on Android, Whether it be through custom ROMs or OEM devices?
"will it ever be possible to have hardware acceleration on Android,"
Possible? Sure, I've seen pigs on the wing.<G> Don't hold your breath for it though. Android is an unruly place where even ordinary hardware is often not supported by the OS and software breaks on every new phone. In order for hardware acceleration to work, the OS needs to have routines and drivers for standard hardware, which means locking down a hardware spec. Which is so very Undroid.
Can't see that happening, unless ten year from now someone invents a "standard universal Android cell phone chipset" and all the manufacturers get paid to exclusively use it. That's the ticket--use our chipset, we'll pay you to use it, and oh, yes, it will play one of "our" ads every time your screen turns on. Or you launch a new app. Or place a call.
(See? Things could get worse!<G>)
Here's an interesting discussion...
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
burtcom said:
Here's an interesting discussion...
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6914
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well as far as I read, it was just a bunch of "me too" and "I agree" lol I got bored reading that I still dont think Google has an official statement on the matter do they?
*********************************************************UPDATE**********************************************************************
Read if your interested in some one else's whining, but as far as sixaxis use is concerned, most of the issues i complained about have been resolved by Dancingpixels the developers of sixaxis in the 0.5.2 release, now includes a touch emulation system that is just Sheer Genius, and resolves most of the issues i complained about with games devs having to get their finger out at all ......... typical.
*************************************************************************************************************************************
Hi folks
Been kind of goaded into this rant due to mounting frustration with the general direction most (almost all) Android games developers seem to be taking . I love my phone (HTC Desire Z) and am now a confirmed Droid Zealot (I'll side with ANYONE against Apple ) But i am getting increasingly frustrated with droid native games, crappy touch controls without any keyboard options. I wanna use my PS3 pad !!!
I cannot be the only one who feels this way?!?!?!
My basic point is 'Touch controls suck for games'!!!!
IMHO much like the gamepad verses mouse argument, for me its not even a debate. Touch controls are ok until you need to make fast precise movements of some kind (usually involves not dying), or you need to make a highly coordinated movement involving changing position and changing POV at the same time.Then it usually all falls apart.
Fingers leave the digitiser, interface routines get confused as thumbs get too close to each other, digitisers just plain ignores some inputs, or your thumbs just end up meeting in the middle !!!!!!
I know touch has the advantage of reconfigurability, and convenience but for games those are its only good points, it scores very low on speed and precision in almost all situations.
Now am not naive i completely understand most Androids have few hardware buttons these days, so it makes sense to develop for the one guaranteed interface device all Androids have. But the problem is that almost the entire Android games dev community seem to suffer from the same problem what i call 'Touch screen Myopia' in that they develop solely for the touch screen, completely ignoring the fact a lot of serious smartphone gamers deliberately choose phones with QWERTY hardware keyboards and standalone Bluetooth controllers are becoming way more popular ( BT controllers usually need native support or a t least a set of keyboard keys that you can config the pad driver to use). So it seems to me about time developers added one or two small additional element to all Android games.
#1: A set of hard coded keyboard keys for all games controls (very simple)
AND/OR
#2: A simple, robust, full controls config system (not that much harder)
Now why this wasn't established as a best practice way back in Android history is beyond me, but maybe it leads me onto another pet peeve. I can't help the suspicion that part of the reason these kind of more adaptable control schemes are rare on native droid games is the rather unfortunate 'Apple Aping' that seems all too common around droid dev.
'Apple does everything with touch (indicative of how seriously Apple take gamers IMHO) so we should too' SCREW that !!!!!!!
Yeah am aware that many devs develop for IOS too and often port to android, but what am talking about isn't hard to implement its less than a days work for a competent programmer. Its a bog standard function in just about every emulator in existence.
Last i want to point out how awesome games like N.O.V.A, Destroy Gunners, ShadowGun, and so many others could be if they had one or both of my suggested control improvements implemented.
There are some games already that implement keyboard keys scheme like 'Turbo Fly 3D' (awesome future racing game) its not technically difficult, its just a matter of devs doing it.
Hey guys,
Why is there no app that uses your front camera and projects a keyboard on the surface of the table? You look at your phones screen and type away on the desk. This would be a pretty cool app. Do you know if there is something like this around?
Thanks
rethan2 said:
Hey guys,
Why is there no app that uses your front camera and projects a keyboard on the surface of the table? You look at your phones screen and type away on the desk. This would be a pretty cool app. Do you know if there is something like this around?
Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's a little difficult to hold your phone and type at the same time.. you'd need a stand which would kind of get in your way.
There's tech out there with eye tracking technology where you could use Holo glasses to type with your eyes although traditional typing is still phenomenally faster. And mouth tracking technology w/ face cam that converts how you move your mouth/tongue to text might be a better tech idea since it could work in any noise level environment and be faster than as fast as most typers can type.
Some day we'll have signal detectors on our heads intercepting directions we think.
But aside from the ergonomic issues, your idea is fun.
Depth sensors
rethan2 said:
Why is there no app that uses your front camera and projects a keyboard on the surface of the table
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Kinect, Touch+, Leap Motion, Nimble Sense, Project Tango, SoftKinetic, Intel RealSense, etc. are all various combinations of hardware and software to detect depth and gestures.
There was also a MIT and Microsoft article about the ability to use infrared LED lights and machine learning techniques to turn a simple single-lens camera into a 3-D one.
technologyreview/com/news/529986/turning-a-regular-smartphone-camera-into-a-3-d-one/
However, at this point, there seems to be a shift to depth cameras, such as the Intel RealSense that is already integrated into laptops.
Time-of-flight (TOF) cameras for point cloud data have more potential,.
It would need to be built into your phone to be cost-effective, and even then, look how pricey Project Tango is right now.
Intel RealSense is in the HP Sprout (has a projector), but it can’t do surface touch yet.
3divi has a "turn a surface into touch surface" prototype Youtube video (youtube/com/watch?v=upGTLrSUa5c ) that uses Kinect, and a Pico projector.
Touch+ was the biggest help last year, as it was only $75 for surface touch, but the people behind it can’t even get the drivers out yet.
Check out Wired’s article on the UI of Magic Leap:
>Magic Leap UI: Totems: cameras on headset could track any piece of material that’s been defined as “mouse.”
>Shows keyboard made from soft rubber that would deform and provide haptic feedback while HMD overlaid images.
>AR system may render virtual computer keyboard on surface of rectangular aluminum
wired/com/2015/01/magic-leaps-vision-for-virtual-reality/
It's like the Optimus Maximum keyboard of 2008, where every keyboard key has an OLED display so that you can remap any key to do whatever you want.
It's like that, except it doesn't cost $2000.
Eye-tracking
TryHardBlueonMac said:
There's tech out there with eye tracking technology where you could use Holo glasses to type with your eyes although traditional typing is still phenomenally faster.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
An Android SDK for eye-tracking was revealed at CES.
dailydot/com/technology/eye-tribe-eye-tracking-android-sdk-ces-2015/
I think that modifying the camera for eye-tracking is cheap, and most likely much cheaper than changing the camera to a depth sensor like in Project Tango.
With surface touch, you still might be looking at the surface some of the time, like in the dual screen HP Sprout.
With eye-tracking, you could have an eye-tracking “select-what-am-looking-at” button.
Look, touch an easy-to-reach “tap-where-I’m-looking” button, look, and then touch the same button again.
You don’t have to keep changing your hand and finger positions between each tap.
For typing:
>Microsoft patents eye-tracking keyboard software
>The idea’s just like swipe-based keyboard software, but instead of tracking the motion of your fingertip, the system tracks eye movement.
pocketnow/com/2014/12/24/eye-tracking-keyboard
Automated lip reading
TryHardBlueonMac said:
And mouth tracking technology w/ face cam that converts how you move your mouth/tongue to text might be a better tech idea since it could work in any noise level environment and be faster than as fast as most typers can type.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It’s a tough problem, but people are working on it:
>“The first problem for automated lip reading is face and lip recognition.
This has improved in leaps and bounds in recent years.
A more difficult challenge is in recognizing, extracting and categorizing the geometric features of the lips during speech.
This is done by measuring the height and width of the lips as well as other features such as the shape of the ellipse bounding the lips, the amount of teeth on view and the redness of the image, which determines the amount of tongue that is visible.
Hassanat’s own visual speech recognition system is remarkably good.
His experiments achieve an average success rate of 76 percent, albeit in carefully controlled conditions.
The success rate is even higher for women because of the absence of beards and mustaches.
All this suggests that there is significant potential for visual speech recognition systems in the future, particularly as an aid to other forms of speech recognition.”
– Ahmad Hassanat at Mu’tah University in Jordan
technologyreview/com/view/530641/the-challenges-and-threats-of-automated-lip-reading/
TryHardBlueonMac said:
Some day we'll have signal detectors on our heads
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
EEG
I’ve heard about the Emotiv EEG.
Just a few basic commands that are paired up with other inputs, like eye-tracking, would be useful.
E.g. of some adequate, basic commands:
* 1) open menu of on-screen shortcuts
* 2) select-what-I’m-looking-at (using eye tracker)
* 3) no/back/cancel
What Emotiv offers:
> “In order to provide consistency and a simple range of possible actions, each user profile will contain space for training data for up to 15 different commands, which are internally labelled COMMAND1 to COMMAND15.
With an eye tracker, you probably don’t need that many brain commands if you’re just going to be using the mind for a “Yes,-select-what-I'm-looking-at” or “back” for on-screen, virtual buttons.
Thought functions merely as the switch.
Hello,
I don't (yet ?) own a PVG100. Therefore, I cannot help with PVG100 hacking.
But I may be of some help nonetheless : I have been (and am still) using a tiny Android phone (Sony-Ericsson Xperia Active, 3 inch screen) for 8 years.
I want to share the best apps I found for small screen Android phones, including PVG100. And I am sure that other folks have good apps to share too !
Please share here !
First, an application that is a must have on all tiny phones. I wouldn't buy a tiny phone that cannot run it.
MessagEase is a VERY different keyboard.
Instead of a myriad of tiny QWERTY keys, it features a small number of big keys.
It is like a numeric keypad, but every key has multiple uses. It depends if you tap it or swipe it or tap-and-hold it.
It takes a few days to get used to it, but when you feel comfortable with it, you wonder how you could use your phone without it.
Try it. Don't drop it after 5 minutes. You will be rewarded.
You can customize letter (and special characters) placement, color, appearance and the size of the keys.
Exideas (the editor of MessagEase) even provides key placements (and word dictionaries) optimized for various languages.
It has a drawback, though : the suggested words are not always the ones you would think of (at least in french). But since you don't make as many typos as with a QWERTY keyboard, suggestions are not as important.
Second, a fully customizable application dedicated to sports (not only biking).
With IpBike, you can select what parameters you want to display, and choose size and placement.
I use it a lot with my phone GPS and an ANT+ heart rate sensor when I hike or run or skate, and with ANT+ cadence & speed sensors on bikes.
If the PVG100 is not ANT+ capable, IpBike is also compatible with Bluetooth sensors.
You can display a map (and follow a GPX trace), record your trip, read graphs on your phone. It is very complete.
Its drawback is that, past 2000 km, you must buy IpBikeKey, a Key program to unlock IpBike.
A small, light and waterproof phone like the PVG100 is well suited for activity monitoring. IpBike is well suited for small (and big) phones.