Samsung Galaxy S II TouchWiz 4.0 has motion-zoom capabilities – will we use it?

by Jesse Bauer on Mar 30th 2011, 10:00am
tagged Android, Galaxy S II, GalaxySIi, gyro, gyroscope, motion, motion control, MotionControl, Samsung, Samsung Galaxy S II, SamsungGalaxySIi, TouchWiz, touchwiz 4.0, Touchwiz4.0, video, zoom, zooming

The new Samsung Galaxy S II has an updated UI with TouchWiz 4.0, and one of the greatest, possibly craziest, features is the ‘motion-zoom’ functionality. Essentially, rather than pinch-zooming a webpage, you would place 2 finger tips somewhere on the screen and move the device physically away or towards you and the accelerometer will interpret that movement and either zoom in or out where your fingers were placed. The idea is actually genius, but whether we will use it is another story.

We are so used to pinch-zoom now, that this feature, although very cool and easy to grasp, may go unused by the masses. It’s sort of like when vehicle manufacturers began putting stereo controls on the steering wheels…I still reach for the actual stereo buttons on the dash. Have a look at the video below.

[via engadget]

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Categorized as Android Phones, Android Software

http://www.brabbler.com Eric

Doesn’t seem very useful to me, but then neither does pinch zooming either.

Lots of people will probably use this as a “hey look at this neat thing my phone can do” and others like me will just ignore it.

So,… not useful but no harm including it anyway
bstringy

The down side here, as with pinch zooming, is it requires two hands. For one-handed browsing, I hope this can be further developed to allow a long press in the bottom corner, etc.
at&t&T customer

F***ing Awesome!!!!
Wheel

Would be really cool if you could use just one finger instead of two! Having to use two fingers defeats what should be the purpose of it – zooming while holding the phone with just one hand. Also, why not scrolling too!