Samsung has a history of making strange stuff. A smartphone with two sloping sides? What? Why? Either way, you have to appreciate, to a certain degree, Samsung’s “fuck it, let’s try it” approach when it comes to some of these ideas. And now a new smartwatch patent shows Sammy’s got even more weird stuff to show us.
Technology is filled with all kinds of rumors and speculation — real and fabricated. BitStream collects all those whispers into one place to deliver your morning buzz.
This patent, spotted by Patently Mobile, is a movable watchface that would be able to track your face’s position and adjust the screen accordingly so you have perfect view at all times. Here’s how Patently Mobile explains how it would all work:
In one important aspect of Samsung’s invention, a smartwatch includes a display having a position that is changeable, an estimation-based position controller configured to determine an initial target position based on a face position and control the display to be moved to the determined initial target position, a face position determiner configured to, based on a face recognition result, determine whether a face exists in front of the display positioned at the initial target position, and a face recognition-based position controller configured to, in response to determining a face does not exist in front of the display, determine a modified target position to enable the display to be positioned toward a face and control the display to be moved to the modified target position.
That’s a lot of tech speak, but essentially the display follows your face. That’s crazy. The patent also says that this feature could adjust automatically or through a user voice command like “display” or “go go gadget face display” or some such.
The idea doesn’t currently seem feasible as there’s no way this wouldn’t be a major deficit to your battery life—the most important feature of all smartwatches right now—and also patents hardly ever mean real products. But knowing Samsung, someday they might just be crazy enough to do it. [Patently Mobile]
Wireless Charging Goes Metal: Wireless charging is great, great, great—but because it’s based on magnetic tech, it’s not exactly so great for metal-bodied phones like the HTC One M9 or the iPhone. But Qualcomm says it’s now figured how to get around that little design limitation. So does this mean wireless charging for the iPhone could be in our future? Anything is possible. [Android Community]
Hello, Note 5: Doesn’t get much clearer than this:
Speaking of the Note 5...: Samsung talked specifics on a new image sensor with pixels that are only 1-micron thick, meaning that’s one incredibly tiny camera. A small sensor usually means a dip in low-light performance but Samsung says it compensates with ISOCELL technology—but we’ll be able to see it in action when it comes baked into the Note 5.
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