As I was searching for some games for my N95, I stumbled upon the Accelerometer support for N95. If you have seen the iPhone ads on TV, you may have been impressed by the feature of the applications changing their display orientation after the iPhone has been rotated. I must say I was very impressed after playing with my friend's iPhone. Little did I know that my N95 also has the capability to do this. It's just that Nokia did not put any application on it to utilise the accelerometer.
There are a couple of applications developed by Nokia Research center which take advantage of the accelorometer - Moving Ball and Activity Monitor, both available from the Nokia Research Center web site.
I have downloaded and tried the Moving Ball demo. It was great! As I move/rotate my handset in any direction, the ball moves or bounces following my motion. If I hold the phone like a ping-pong ball bat and swing it, the ball displayed on screen actually bounce up and down against the 'bat'.
According to these videos, the French developer Samir has made some cool applications using this technology - RotateMe and Nokmote. I particularly like Nokemote where it allows the user to control the application by moving the handset without having to press any buttons/keys - e.g. in the music player, tilt left to rewind, tilt right to fast-forward, bounce it down and up to select song, etc. Unfortunately, the author's web site is down.
There are others of course: There is a dedicated forum on N95Users suggesting all sorts of cool uses with videos to show; NiiMe is too shaky to be practical; FlipSilent and ShakeSMS are pretty good, but I am not sure if they drain the battery; Landscape Pro, but it's not free; Alas, all I can do with a great piece of technology is to use it as a ping-pong ball bat!
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