HOT: Large Hi-N-Bye Preview

I think you all know one of the greatest accelerometer application which is available at the moment and plays probably still the most important role in the section of S60 motion input software, describing an impressive example of what users of a accelerometer supporting S60 handset can do with an application which makes full use of sensor technology.

“RockNScroll”, developed by Keynetik, Inc., a pioneer of motion input technology for mobile handheld electronic devices such as cell phones, cameras, media players, gaming consoles, personal navigation devices and digital assistants, brought motion input capabilites to S60 handsets with built in accelerometers like the N82, N95 and N95 8GB.

The user was able to control his phone just with gestures: navigating through the menu as been realized by simulating direction keys with little flicks of the wrist and the confirmation and back/exit commands with the nice idea of a push pull feature.

The high popularity Keynetik, Inc. is enjoying now due to the nearly perfectly balanced sensitivity of “RockNScroll” made users of their product of course curious for further projects and I am very happy to announce that the time of waiting is over now.

I was among the chosen group of beta testers of the application Keynetik, Inc. was working at among other projects. This preview which is unfortunately published a little bit after the release shall give you an impression of what you can await from the lastest innovative idea of using motion input for a useful S60 application by Keynetik.

“Hi-N-Bye” is the name of the application which will for sure impress everyone who loved “RockNScroll” as a new application which facilitates the daily use with your S60 phone by using inuitive gesture control.

Purpose

As usual, you cannot describe the purpose of such a complexe application in just a few words. Basically you can say that “Hi-N-Bye” gives its user the possibility to control phone calls through motion input.
All the daily functions you need like answering and hanging up a call or additional possibilites like activating the loud speakers, controlling a second call and much more. The features in particular can be seen below.

As a little reminder, every single function can be executed with a certain gesture, without the need to press any key.

You may think that “Hi-N-Bye” doesn’t bring new features compared to existing applications: “FlipSilent” has the possibility to activate the loudspeakers by using the slider and can hang up a call with a gesture, similar to Samir’s the applications ”ShutUp” which can also hang up calls and ”LoudUp” which will also be able to active loudspeakers (not released yet).
But I can tell you that “Hi-N-Bye” can do a lot more than just controlling a call in the limited ways. It continues to walk a path that the mentioned applications have started to walk by extending existing features and adding totally new ones, all implemented as replacement for your phone’s keyboard.

Continue to read to learn more about the amazing features Keynetik, Inc. has imagined and the way they implemented them.

Settings

As we know it from “RockNScroll”, Keynetik, Inc. has struggled to add many useful settings which give the user the opportunity to adapt the application to his wishes.

Presented in a nicer UI than “RockNScroll’s” one, “Hi-N-Bye” lets you personalise nearly every part of the application you can think of.

Auto Start:

The first available setting might sound like default one that every accelerometer application should have integrated, but “RockNScroll” users will be delighted about the addition of the “Auto Start” feature of ”Hi-N-Bye”. For “RockNScroll” users it was really annoying to not be able to to enjoy motion control directly after the phone boot, to have the need of launching the application manually.

Auto starting the application works perfectly, incoming phone calls that you receive shortly after starting your phone can immediately be controlled through motion input by using “Hi-N-Bye”.

Application Type:

The possibility to set the “Application Type” has been proposed by a beta tester and is also for me a totally new one, because it has just been added in the second unofficial version I was able to test.

It’s not really a setting which influences the proper function of the application. Setting it as “System Application” will help you to avoid accidental application exists when using the task manager. A “System Application” can only be closed by using the integrated “Exit” option and not by pressing the “C” key in the task manager.
Setting it as “Regular Application” will make “Hi-N-Bye” act like a usual S60 application.

Timeout:

If you enable the “Timeout” feature, you will be able to specifiy the length of time “Hi-N-Bye” uses the built in accelerometer to detect possible movements with which you can control a call.

By activating the “Timout” feature, you will be able to set the “Timeout Period” (next setting). Disactivating “Timeout” will result in very high battery consumption, because the accelerometer will be ready to receive motion commands for the whole call length.

However this is the only possibility to control a call for its whole duration through motion input.

Timeout Peridod:

The possibility to set the “Timeout Period” will appear in case you have activated the “Timeout” feature. As explained above, you can manually set the period that the accelerometer will detect movements.

I give you an example: If you set timeout to 1 min and want to use motion input after 1 minute to control your calls, you won’t be able to do so because Hi-N-Bye will go into sleep mode and stop using the accelerometer until the next incoming or outgoing call is detected. This is done in order to help preserve your battery.

You have a range of time between 1 min and 30 min to choose.

Shake Assignment:

Now it becomes interesting: “Shake Assignment” is the first setting which influences call controlling through motions.

As I will explain a little bit more exactly below under “Features”, “Keynetik, Inc.” has added the shake gesture to simulate either a keypress on the “Right Soft Key” or the “Green Key”. Both keys are used to do further actions with a call like activating the loud speakers.
The actions which can be performed with a shaker will be explained under “Features”.

Push Assignment:

Very similar works the “Push Assignment” setting. You can also choose between one of the two different keys that shall be simulated when pushing the phone away from you, same as you perform an “OK” action in “RockNScroll”.

Hide application:

A very nice option that has been added in the last beta version. Like we know it from Samir’s applications like “rotateMe” or “ShutUp”, you can hide “Hi-N-Bye” from the task list. Of course very useful as “Hi-N-Bye” will run in background most of the time you are using your phone as long as you don’t call anybody and would and so it would extend the task list unneedlessly.

Of course you can also unhide the application again, so that it will be visible in the task list again.

After having changed some settings, you can save them through the “Save settings” entry in the options menu. The “Run in background” command will minimize “Hi-N-Bye” like you would have pressed the menu key.

Furthermore, you have access on a large help file that offers everything you need to know about the gesture commands and features.

These are all the available settings. As you can see, already pretty impressive. I hope you are now curious to discover how “Hi-N-Bye” works in practice.

Features

Answer an incoming call:

Possibly the most important and of course a basic feature is thepossibility to answer an incoming call. The idea to translate it into a movement has been solved very nicely by Keynetik.

The phone screen must be turned up as if you would look at who is calling you and then you put the phone to year. After doing the mentioned movements, the phone call is automaticall answered and you can immediately begin to talk with your opposite.

Especially this motion impresses me much. It is very intuitive, as you actually need not do anything special. The moves you execute to answer the call are done in the same way when you don’t use “Hi-N-Bye’s” motion capabilites (of course apart from pressing the green key to anwer the call manually).

Hang up/End current conversation:

Keynetik has also thought of a gesture that is easy to execute as it doesn’t come in conflict with false detections and which is easy to remember.

Also a very intuitive in my opinion is their choice which is as follows: When having a conversation and you want to end the call, you can just have to turn your phone upside down so that the phone screen looks parallely to the ground.

Also this movement worked perfectly without any issues and couldn’t have been converted in a better way.

Send the incoming call to voice mail (reject call):

Sending a call to voice mail is also no problem for “Hi-N-Bye”. The first steps are the same as when answering a call: The phone screen must be turned up so that you can look at the caller ID. Now you can either answer the call with the movement ahead or send the call to voice mail by turning the phone and putting the screen down and parallel to the ground.

Enable/Disable loudspeakers:

“Hi-N-Bye” offers not only possibilites to answer or end a call, but also options during a phone call.

The option to enable or disable the loudspeakers and the next option can be controlled with the two different gestures I have explained under “Settings”. Either pushing the phone away from you or a shaker, depending on the settings, will first enable the loudspeakers and with a further one disable them again.

In the first beta versions, the push gesture detection didn’t work very well. However, through feedback of the chosen group of beta testers, Keynetik improved the motion input so far that also this issues could have been fixed so that shaker and push detection work very well.

Second Call Options:

Last but not least Keynetik though also of an option that I honestly would have forgotten about: you can control second incoming calls when you are on an active call.

Again the gesture to control the call depends on your settings. You can control the call with a push command or a shaker like you can do it with the loudspeakers.

The second call can either be answered, rejected or swapped.

If you don’t use one of the functions for which you can set the control gesture yourself, you can also use both commands to control one function.

Also great is that you can use all of the features (except for pick up) with outgoing calls as
well as with incoming calls.

Video

Keynetik has recorded a very nice video which illustrates the use of the application in moving pictures. Sometimes a video says more than a thousand words.

 

Reliability

If you may have already nocticed, I am really impressed by the reliability of the different gesture commands and so I can make this part of the preview very short.

The perfectly chosen different gestures which are all very different make it easy to not perform accidentally a wrong move that would execute a false command.

Keynetik succeded in improving the gesture detection massively with the help of the chosen group of beta testers. The first betas I used didn’t detect the push command correctly, the final version however does the job very well, without any problems.

So honestly, I don’t have any points I could think of where “Hi-N-Bye” could still be improved. The beta testing phase was very worthful and plays a very important role for the perfect reliablity of “Hi-N-Bye”.

Conclusion

Impressive feature list, lots of settings, perfect reliability – “Hi-N-Bye” is another great work by Keynetik which will impress every user whose mobile phone’s first purpose is to answer phone calls or also everybody who is still amazed by accelerometer technology.

It’s a really fascinating feeling to control your phone calls without any key press, but with easy to remember and intuitive gesture commands.

As I said, I still can’t find any point I wished to see improved as Keynetik thought of every little part that the user would need in the daily use with “Hi-N-Bye”.
Maybe a setting to hide the application from the task list like Samir’s applications have an option, but that’s such a little aspect and really not that important.

So, I must say that I am once again very very impressed by the Keynetik developers and I truly hope to see more of this innovative gesture controlled applications for S60.

The only thing that you won’t like the application may be the fact that it’s not freeware like “RockNScroll”. But actually it’s fully understandable, because it’s the job of the developers to create such applications.

In cooperation with the beta testers, Keynetik demands a very fair price of 6 € for “Hi-N-Bye”, money that is absolutely worth to be invested into the great accelerometer application.

So head over to buy it directly here.