Phone Sense

By Wilson Rothman

Motion sensing has found its way into remote controls, laptop computers and video-game accessories. Now it's in cell phones too. Recently Samsung debuted the SCH-S310, the first mobile with "3-D movement recognition." Wave it in the air, and it interprets your wandlike gestures. In normal use, shaking the phone twice ends a call. Draw a 3, and it types the digit. Make an X, and the phone generates the voice response "no." If you're listening to music on the built-in MP3 player, you can jerk the phone to the right to skip to the next track. Best of all, the phone's "beat box" function lets you build grooves by shaking the phone, air-drum style. Each time you play, you can pick a different sound such as tambourine, clap or scratch, and you can save your most excellent beats to impress friends later on. The SCH-S310 is scheduled to go on sale in South Korea later this year, but if applications for the technology develop, it's likely that motion sensing will show up in Samsung's U.S. phones too. --By Wilson Rothman