Finally! I’ve been looking for something like this for quite a while and I think Motorola might have done it. The Motorola Smart Controller is a Bluetooth controller that uses various BT profiles that allow you to control the tablet (good when it’s docked across the room and connected via HDMI to a big screen perhaps?) and take calls. I couldn’t confirm if it allows voice controlled calling and it would have been nice to see it used as a remote notifier for alarms, numbers, notifications. it also seems to be lacking audio controls such as play/pause, next track etc. I’m definitely going to check it out in detail when I can get hold of one.
We were lucky enough to get a few days with the Aava / Intel / Meego phone earlier this year and our tests with the handset UX showed that there was a lot of work to do. In a presentation at the MeeGo onference in Dublin today, we saw progress, a good working demo and future planning but still, there’s so much missing. Granted, these user-experiences are just baseline builds to show how the core features can be used but still, it seems to us there are some hooks that need to be added.
With no active icons support (showing number of unread emails for example) and a single homescreen with no widget support it means that product developers will have a lot of work to do to implement these features. On the other hand, the notifications subsystem looks good with support for multiple notification types triggering multiple different notification methods including notification lights, haptics and of course, dialog boxes. We didn’t see any dialog box handling mechanism though so we’re hoping this will be well controlled when it gets implemented.
The demo was done on a Moorestown based Aava Smartphone platform.
As the epicenter of Intel’s work on a mobile operating systems shift slightly towards Europe, being here as an Intel Insider becomes a major advantage. On Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending a tweet-up with Josh Bancroft in Munich and today, we’re the recipients of some live images of MeeGo 1.1 and the handset UX running on an Intel-based (Moorestown) phone from Aava. The team responsible for some of the technical aspects of MeeGo and mobile platforms in Europe is obviously working hard and we look forward to meeting them at the MeeGo Summit in November but in the meantime, they’ve been kind enough to send over some images of one of the phones they are testing.
It’s images only at the moment but if everything we might goes to plan, we’ll be able to give you something special next week. Stay tuned!
Click through for full size images of the home screen, dialer and applications switching. There’s a signature style here and I like the little MeeGo people! Once again, stay tuned for more next week.
Finally! I’ve been looking for something like this for quite a while and I think Motorola might have done it. The Motorola Smart Controller is a Bluetooth controller that uses various BT profiles that allow you to control the tablet (good when it’s docked across the room and connected via HDMI to a big screen perhaps?) and take calls. I couldn’t confirm if it allows voice controlled calling and it would have been nice to see it used as a remote notifier for alarms, numbers, notifications. it also seems to be lacking audio controls such as play/pause, next track etc. I’m definitely going to check it out in detail when I can get hold of one.
