The new iPhone and the Palm Pre both launched this week, but bring few major features that haven’t been seen before (Images: Courtesy of Apple and Palm)

Innovation is our regular column that highlights the latest emerging technological ideas and where they may lead.

This week was a big one in the world of gadgets. Not only did the firm leading the smartphone market, Apple, unveil a a new iPhone; but a new contender, Palm, staked its reputation on a smartphone of its own.

Yet despite all the fanfare, neither phone offers much that is new. Each boasts a luscious full-colour, multi-touch-sensitive screen, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi access, a camera, light sensors and an accelerometer – as do their competitors the Blackberry Storm, HTC Magic and various others.

The core package of what makes up a smartphone has already been established and the competition between them will be, for now, over relative subtleties rather than unique, blockbusting hardware. Yet cutting-edge research is still suggesting genuinely novel additions to the smartphone package. Here are just a few of them…


Feeling the squeeze

Giving phones a new way to pick up their users’ intentions could make the devices more intuitive to use and open up many new applications.

One idea being explored by Brandon Taylor and Michael Bove at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge is to build pressure sensors into the phone that can detect the exact position of a person’s fingers.

The phone can switch function depending on your grip; flipping between camera, phone, music player or games controller as appropriate, for example, without you pressing any buttons.

Backwards approach

Another suggestion is to put the touchscreen on the back, not the front. That avoids what Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, calls the “fat finger” problem of your digit obscuring what you are trying to select.

When a user moves a finger along the back of such a device, they see a ghostly finger on the screen, creating the sense that the gadget is transparent.

After a first, somewhat-clunky, prototype Baudisch is now testing a much-improved slimmer version called NanoTouch. It’s about the size of a small phone, but the unusual interface allows greater precision. In tests, users have been able to accurately touch targets on the screen just 1.8 millimetres across.

Distant forces

Another answer to the small screen problem is to move the user interface off the device altogether.

Alex Butler’s team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, added infrared sensors to a phone to let it detect the position of fingers up to 10 centimetres away, when the device is placed on a flat surface.

This system, dubbed Sidesight, can be used to interact with objects onscreen without touching the phone at all and could be particularly useful for using a handset to control another device, whether a robot or a TV. The prototype device tested well, with users reporting they felt they were touching the imaginary edges of large photos as they manipulated them.

Battery life continues to be a problem, with many smart phones running low on juice after a day of heavy use. This week Nokia suggested a possible answer with a prototype that scavenges energy from mobile antennas and TV masts to charge itself. At the moment it can only grab 3 to 5 milliwatts – but if the Nokia team can increase that level by a factor of ten, the phone would scavenge enough energy to actually recharge the battery.

Feel the beat

Suggesting new ways for phones to communicate with their users is also keeping researchers busy. The “Frankenphone” designed at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, vibrates with a heartbeat that is strong when the phone is fully charged, but weakens as the battery runs low.

User tests suggest that some find the beating phone a reassuring presence in their pocket – although others think it’s annoying.

A similar idea from the University of Glasgow, UK, uses a phone’s vibrate function to simulate the feel and sound of sloshing liquid to communicate battery life.

These concept devices are currently doing the rounds at science and technology conferences rather than consumer trade fairs, but it’s only a few years since the very concept of the smartphone was little more than a research project, so any one of them could, in a modified form, soon find its way into a pocket near you.

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