Vlog: Nokia N95 Accelerometer Demonstration

October 31st, 2007 • Mark Guim • Filed Under •

I made a short video showing the Nokia N95’s accelerometer. After months of owning the Nokia N95, I’m surprised this phone had it! You might be familiar with this technology from watching the iPhone commercials where the screen automatically changes when you hold it sideways. This is such a cool feature, I don’t understand why Nokia haven’t fully integrated it with the phone yet. Check out the video.

Video thumbnail. Click to play
Click To Play

Video Formats: M4V (Original 640×480 resolution), MP4 (download on your Nseries phone), or YouTube.

Testing the accelerometer comes in the form of MovingBall, a software plug-in developed by Nokia. It does nothing else other than move the ball when you tilt the phone. I’m really surprised how responsive it is. It also knows when you shake the phone.

Download MovingBall if you want to try it out yourself.

A program that will take advantage of this technology is RotateMe 2.0 which should be coming out soon. Zach from Symbian in Motion expects RotateMe 2.0 at the end of November. It will add an auto-rotate feature ‘a la iPhone’ that will be compatible only with the Nokia N95.

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  • You beat me to it! lol ;) It's funny that before the rotateMe vid I had no idea that the N95 even had an accelerometer, let alone a pretty decent one...

    Btw do you have to install the plug-in before the ball demo will work? I installed it first so I don't know and I only mention it because I only see the one file linked above.
  • @Zach I only installed one file, which is the one I linked to above. It is pretty decent! I wonder what kind of apps will use this feature.
  • mark, can you please enable embedding for the youtube video?
  • @stefan Should be embeddable now.
  • Ah - I wonder what weird dev tool I installed then :)

    It's definitely responsive - supports 28 values from what I can gather. To be honest, I'm VERY surprised that there aren't already a whole bunch of apps out there that make use of the accelerometer. Even more surprising is that the only thing Nokia uses it for as far as I can tell is image orientation - That's crazy! The "cool stuff" that their demoing on S60 Touch could easily already exist on the N95 (for example - flipping the phone over to kill/snooze an alarm, shaking the phone to trigger a response, etc)...
  • This is indeed some interesting news. I wonder if the Accelerometer can detect a bit more than just the orientation. Because that video of turning the phone over to silence would be a neat feature if the Accelerometer was a part of it.

    As for why other apps don't take advantage of it, besides the camera and browser, only games and specailty apps really benefit from it.
  • @ARJW Oh I totally disagree with that. There are plenty of different ways that the integrated apps and third party apps could integrate with the accelerometer. The alarm and rotateMe are just two great examples but if you get creative there are plenty of possibilities. With an accelerometer that supports 28 values you could easily control all kind of functions with gestures - a simple flip of the wrist in one direction or the other to cycle images in the gallery forward or back, turn the phone face down to pause video playback in a media player, a gentle shake of the device for one second to mute an incoming call, etc etc...
  • @Zach those are all really cool features that I'd wanna see! I still can't believe this just pop out of nowhere even when this phone has been available for some time.

    A Nokia tv commercial showing those "gestures" will definitely grab some attention.
  • @Mark Definitely! I noticed something else that's pretty cool and also telling about the capabilities of the n95's accelerometer. Open the ball demo and hold the phone horizontally with the screen facing straight up away from the ground. Now shake the phone up and down. :)

    Now something possibly troubling about Nokia's implementation: Put your phone in landscape mode and play with the ball demo. It seems even the Nokia developers who created the demo either couldn't (or didn't) code it well enough to accomodate both screen modes, or there is a bigger oversight in the phone's design. I hope it's not the latter!
  • This is a truly revolutionary discovery. I can only begin to imagine the possibilities of what this could be used for. Can't wait to see what great ideas develop around this awesome N95 feature. Chalk one more up on the "things the N95 can do" list. It's going to be a very good future for mobile indeed. :)
  • N95-1
    news like this really puzzle me..
    like many of you alreday said, HOW IN THE WORLD is it possible that such a cool feature was not known and used already by the S60 community/deveolpers from the beginning of the N95?!?
    hello? making HUGE amounts of money, anyone?? can you imagine how many tousand users will just buy a feature like the autorotator? how about a d-pad emulator that runs in the background as a servivce? racing games? ths list is endless..

    in contrast, did you notice how ultra-fast first demos were deveoped for the iphone? was the API for this just yet released by nokia or what?? will someone please explain this to me? c'mon, i mean, really...
  • deejaysonic
    Wahay :-) Somebody please write apps with this sensory thingy !! How about (as already mentioned) alarms, photos, web scrolling, contacts, picture viewing, games, applications, music and video controls, etc, etc, etc !!!
  • Tili
    A big question in my mind is whether it is a 3D accelerometer or 2D. Can it detect alititude also? Sadly, I don't have N95 to check myself.
  • It's 3D :)
  • Jordi
    Hi!

    I think that the reason of the existence of accelerometer in N95 was the feature of the videocamera: Stabilizer.

    When you record a video, you can use this feature, and a accelerometer is the key.

    I think....

    Good nigth!
  • Emiel Florijn
    Maybe they didnt release this function untill the launch of the N-gage2.0 platform.. maybe there will be a ton of games already in the making that use this device for controlling, wouldnt surprise me at all because controlling games on mobile devices was an issue before.. and no one
  • anonimous
    All that you want is done, look at http://www.bysamir.fr/ and there you could see the new rotateme that works as iphone but with the N95 and the most amazing is the nokmote, there is a video demo playing with the sensor of the N95, it´s amazing!!
  • Jean-Pierre
    Nice Gadget,hope it will also work on my N95-8GB.
    BTW where did you get the music you used in your demo?
    Grtz
  • This phone gets better by the day. I wonder how many other technologies are hidden, only to be discovered when Nokia thinks it's the right time.

    The moving ball is brilliant, and this opens the doors for so many things. It's fantastic to think that the many sheep out there will flock to get the iPhone, when the Nokia N95 offers so much more.
  • Chris
    Only recently got an N95. Also a new Mondeo with built in Bluetooth and they don't work together. Nokia say it's Fords problem. They even have a web poage about it. nokia.com/ford - see compatibility - No N95!!!

    Any suggestions guys. Like the Ford. Like the N95 don't want to change either but need phone and car to communicate.
  • I've blogged about the n95 accelerometer - some good applications available! I do wonder what the iPhone has to offer in the way of 'fun' applications / accelerometer!?
  • RotateMe is rather cool too!

    View My Post
  • chop
    I love the rotateme and the nokmote is still in the developing stages( but its still great). The Flip Silent works wonders when i wanna be left alone at times lol. I dont know what the accelerometer's sole purpose was in the N95, but thank god for it.
  • skelg
    i cant install any of these great apps on my n95. why? first i install the accelerometer plug-in then the rotate me v2.0 but it will say contact the author or something. can anyone help?
  • Joff
    Feel a bit like a simpleton: i can't seem to get RotateMe to install on my N95 8gb, I've tried changing the application manager menu thingy to allow all applications not just signed ones but it comes up with a message saying "certificate error: contact application supplier" Has anyone else had this problem and how can i sort it? I really want RotateMe, it looks cool!
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