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5
Mar 05
Sat

Powerbook Accelerometre

The new Powerbooks have an accelerometre inside. It detects if a Powerbook is falling and parks the hard drive heads to lessen the chance of a hard drive crash. The accelerometre can be tapped into for other purposes and people have been throwing up ideas about making it into a user interface input. It’s a snazzy idea, but are you really going to want to pick up your 2kg, $3000+ laptop and give it a shake around just to do some “rapid e-mail filing” which could be accomplished by hitting keyboard buttons instead? I also read that it could have applications in other devices, such as mobiles: “nod” the phone and down for “OK”, shake from side to side for “cancel”. But same problem, moving the thumb to hit a button is a lot easier than moving your whole forearm. (Similar reason to why people use speed dial instead of voice dialing.)

Still, there is some novelty value to being able to use your laptop as an expensive spirit level.

This post has 5 comments

1.  Shish

It’s the Pedantic Patrol! [applause]

The Aussie/British spelling of “metre”, AFAIK, only applies to the unit of measurement. In the sense of a measuring device, it’s “meter” like the American spelling of both.

2.  Shish

But moving out of pedantic mode, I have one word.

Pinball.

3.  Stu

Ahh excellent, I didn’t know about “-meter”. Will keep that in mind for future.

4.  ajh

IBM have been putting the Active Protection System into their ThinkPad for a while now (12 mths or more?) , it’s pretty neat. You can pull up a status display and then view the 3D orientation of the laptop as you move it around in the air (ie, tilt it to one side).

5.  mechanical turk

Ahhhh! A Powerbook etch-a-sketch cum pedometer! What’s not to like?

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