Over the last few years, touch has become a mainstream input method for mobile phones, especially smartphones. Thanks to these touch technologies, smartphone users are able to more easily operate small devices and utilize an increasingly intuitive experience.

Touch technologies are evolving in accuracy and have become more diverse, including haptic adaptation and highly-sensitive and accurate response.

What comes next? Verbal operation may replace physical touch operation in the near future. Mobile devices will respond according to vocal communication. Of course, the evolutionary step after that is to reach a stage of think-to-act operation.

In the interim, motion-based operation has emerged as another remarkable approach. Via indirect motions communicated to the phone, certain operations can occur as smoothly as if one was touching the device. Depending on the situation, motion-based operations can be as useful as thoughts. Take for example, simple and repetitive operations such as receiving a call or photo gallery viewing.

# A motion sensor in the front-facing camera lets you answer the phone, turn the page of an e-book and listen to music without touching the phone.

Think of what you have to do now to receive a call while eating a pizza with your hands. Typically, you have two choices: one is to find a napkin and clean your hands before touching the screen with your oily fingers or you could go ahead and retrieve your phone and clean up the screen later.

Pantech, the second-largest smartphone maker in Korea, after Samsung Electronics and ahead of LG Electronics, recently released the word’s first motion-sensor LTE smartphone, called Vega LTE.

The Vega LTE utilizes a motion-detection function in which the front-facing camera responds to human movement. With motion recognition, the user can answer the phone without having to touch their hand on the screen by simply shaking it from side to side. It is possible to turn the page of an e-book, go from one photo to the next, or listen to music with just a simple motion and without having to touch the phone directly.

Of course the LTE phone is not perfect yet, however, it is not yet possible to perform all functions based on a motion. However, it is obviously taking a big step toward resolving many inconveniences in the lives of consumers.

Additionally, Pantech has introduced an enhanced user interface (UI), called FLUX. FLUX was embedded on the Vega LTE and has optimized the Android OS and will be included in all future smartphones released in Korea and overseas markets.

The UI is more user friendly, including a Power Save mode. Power Save mode enables the efficient use of power and also supports a sleep function that acts according to remaining battery power to help with power conservation at times when the phone is less frequently used.

A new tab feature, just like the Google Chrome browser on a PC, makes multitasking web browsing much easier. Through the tab at the top of the page, it is possible to quickly move from one page to another. In addition, by providing categories when you add a new tab, such as the most visited sites and recently closed tabs, it is now even easier to navigate to a desired site.

Vega LTE features a 4.5-in WXGA LCD display with a 1280 x 800 pixels. The Android 2.3 Gingerbread-based smartphone sports a Qualcomm 1.5 GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM. Other features includes 16 GB of internal memory, mobile-payment-enabled NFC, a 1830 mAh high-capacity battery, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and terrestrial DMB. The Vega LTE is currently only available in Korea.

Seong-ju Lee benoie@telecomskorea.com

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