At first sight the idea makes our imagination fly because we normally associate Kinect with the Xbox, but if we think about a mobile phone approach we can imagine a broad number of things that could become possible.
This year, in February Nokia announced their partnership with Microsoft in order to equip their phones with Windows Mobile 7 and drop the well-known Symbian OS. This decision has been heavily criticized and was not well received by the investors, but what if great products come out of this partnership?
On the one hand we have Microsoft that has been trying so hard (with little success) to implement their platform on mobile devices, but at the same time they had a huge success with Kinect product since the software company was able to sell more than 10 million units within the first months of this year. This contradiction can be transformed in an advantage by adapting Kinect capabilities to a mobile phone. Microsoft knows that very well, and they are working in some features for Windows Mobile 7 to make it interact with the Xbox as we can see in the video.
Kinect and Windows Phone 7 Integration
On the other hand we have Nokia who has faced tough competition and market share loss in smart phones segment is betting on WM7 in order to improve their sales.
Nokia also has been planning something related with Kinect as we can see with the concept phone called “Nokia Kinect”. This interesting concept will take advantage of Kinect motions, for example it will stand up by itself when we receive a call or a message, in the same way we would be able to reject a call by just tapping the phone back down, it will also include other motion based commands.
Also in the Nokia’s Beta Labs webpage we can see a number of related discussion topics like, “Kinect scrolling or Microsoft Kinect as controller?”. Nokia is obviously looking carefully at people’s opinions about those ideas.
Probably we will start seeing phones with Kinect functionalities or Kinect interactions with Windows Mobile 7 by the end of the year and they could be really interesting. Kinect + Nokia, how does that sound? Sounds good!
2 réponses à “Kinect + Nokia, how does that sound?”
The idea sounds quite interesting and hopefully the concept will evolve to integrate even more cool features since Kinect functionalities cannot only be applied to games but to many other things too. It is something that Nokia should pay close attention to if they want to recover strength in the market, and make quick moves this time to stop competitors from taking the lead as it has happened before. Perhaps the drawback in this case would be battery life; may be Nokia is already taking that into account given the available solutions in the market. Personally I hope Nokia is able to take the best out of its venture with Microsoft and will make smarter moves this time to gain momentum again.
This phone looks very nice and will probably be a success given that the phone can stand up when you get a call and when you tap it goes down but only if we also suppose that the person has bought an xbox to play games on their TV with it, it doesn’t seem to be the best idea as people are not going to buy a phone and then spend another $400 to buy an xbox to use it with. Also, people would prefer to use a proper controller rather than having to play using a phone. The phone can be successful given its other features but this seems to be Microsoft’s way of selling more xbox’s and make more money.