Semi-pointless but awesome Note 2 feature

[s44]

http://pulse.me/s/dTpAc

"Smart rotation" makes its debut on the Note 2, and like the Galaxy S3's Smart Stay, it uses a bit of front-facing camera trickery to work its magic. When the phone rotates, the device uses the front-facer to work out what orientation your face is in, then match the orientation of the screen accordingly, based on the built-in orientation sensor. That means even if you're reading at an angle, the Note 2 can recognize this and keep things the right way up.

This actually really annoys me when the standard behavior messes up when reading in bed.

 

[vshah]

awesome

 

[PrayForDeath]

http://pulse.me/s/dTpAc

This actually really annoys me when the standard behavior messes up when reading in bed.

Yeah I have this problem when reading on the iPad in bed. This feature would be nice.

 

[Red Storm]

First thing I did with my S3 is try out all the motion based features... and then disabled every one of them.

I don't understand how this is an issue. It's ridiculously easy and quick to enable/disable rotation. Set it and forget it.

 

[Roland00Address]

There are many apps out there that allow you to chose the orientation of the screen and then lock the screen in place. They are perfect for reading in bed. Just giving you guys a heads up for anyone who isn't going to get a note.

 

[podspi]

This feature is actually pretty awesome. Assuming it doesn't use too much battery power...

 

[Jinny]

*shrugs
i just mapped the search button on my galaxy 2 to toggle rotate.

 

[TheStu]

Yeah I have this problem when reading on the iPad in bed. This feature would be nice.

You can remap the mute switch to lock the rotation instead. You can also double press the home button and swipe right and there is a lock button there.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Good luck using this in dark or dim environments.

 

[tommo123]

sounds good. at the mo i have tasker setup to disable auto rotate unless i'm in specific apps

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

First thing I did with my S3 is try out all the motion based features... and then disabled every one of them.

I don't understand how this is an issue. It's ridiculously easy and quick to enable/disable rotation. Set it and forget it.

The point is it rotates with your face. So it rotates in other cases but will not rotate if you decide to lie down and look at your screen sideways. You're describing a whole different situation.

I realize you don't use some of these features that Samsung's included, and that's fine, but it's not a useless tool...

It's like saying disable auto screen lock is the solution around reading an article on your phone when Samsung offers the smart stay feature. There's advantages and disadvantages to both.

 

[Red Storm]

sounds good. at the mo i have tasker setup to disable auto rotate unless i'm in specific apps

That... is a good idea. I need to do that.

My short experience with Smart Stay: I noticed the screen not turning off and thought "cool" and then put the phone down on my desk (not near me or my face, like an arm's reach away) and I noticed the screen stayed on. And stayed on. And stayed on. It never turned off. When I brought it up to my face and then turned it upside down it finally did turn off. Bugs like that can leave you with a dead phone in the middle of the day.

I still think it's a trivial feature. iOS devices can take care of it with a double tap, and Android can use a multitude of different ways be it widgets, notification toggles, or even automatically via apps like tasker.

I'm not really seeing anything in this "killer" feature other than increased resource usage (be it significant or not).

 

[tommo123]

might keep tasker then when i get my note 2

 

[s44]

Dunno about you, but I haven't found an app/widget that properly locks my Prime's orientation in the angle it's at just at the moment. Only the Asus settings panel seems to control/enable that: just toggling auto-rotate to off in any other way snaps you back to default landscape.

Same on my G Nexus except it's default portrait.

 

[PrayForDeath]

I'm not really seeing anything in this "killer" feature other than increased resource usage (be it significant or not).

No one coined it as a "killer" feature, in fact the title of the thread clearly states it's semi-pointless, heh.

 

[Mopetar]

I don't understand how this is an issue. It's ridiculously easy and quick to enable/disable rotation. Set it and forget it.

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing as I almost always have my screen rotation locked, so I've never run into this particular problem.

Good luck using this in dark or dim environments.

Wouldn't the light from the display be enough to illuminate your face? Even on the lowest brightness settings, most tablets should put out enough light that the camera would be able to distinguish enough facial features to determine the proper orientation. As long as it could pick out your eyes, which would be one of the things that are most easily detectable, it should be able to determine how to set the orientation.

 

[Zaap]

Sounds like kind of a Rube Goldberg solution that's much bettered handled by simply selecting a rotation lock preference while reading. :\

 

[psych2]

solve all the first world problems!

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Sounds like kind of a Rube Goldberg solution that's much bettered handled by simply selecting a rotation lock preference while reading. :\

How do you turn on rotation lock on a Note 2? Is there a slider like an iPad? You have to go through menus. The fact that the Note 2 can do the following on its own is good:

- Rotate when you rotate the screen orientation with respect to your face.
- Not rotate when you decide to lie down on your side with your Note.

I think that's a step up from having to comb through menus to turn on rotation when you want it and turn it off when you don't. It's not a killer feature, but I don't get people appreciate this.

It shows insight into user features that make life easier. I appreciate the work that samsung put into figure this out. It's very logical. It's part of what makes the experienced refined--something Google didn't care about in 2.x OSes, and still somewhat lacks in the 4.x series.

 

[Zaap]

How do you turn on rotation lock on a Note 2? Is there a slider like an iPad? You have to go through menus.

It's one click of a widget to toggle auto rotate on or off.
On the SGS3, it's simply pulling down the power toggles from the notifications dropdown. No reason Samsung couldn't do the same with the Note.

Not that it's not a bad feature if it works, just as the thread title says: semi-pointless.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

It's one click of a widget to toggle auto rotate on or off.

its zero clicks with this feature. plus you have to waste screen space to have a widget. you also need to be on that screen to click it. you also need to think ahead of time that you're going to lie down in bed so you have to turn rotation lock on. then when you're done, you have to remember to turn rotation lock off because you could be reading flipboard in portrait but watching movies landscape sometime later.

Like i said i appreciate the iPad's ability to have a physical switch that toggles it. THAT is always 1 click away. The widget is not. It could be many clicks if youre in an app already (Press home => scroll to page with widget => turn on rotation lock, or Home => Menu => Settings => however many steps it takes to get to rotation lock => turn it on).

I just don't get how you can compare this Samsung feature with turning rotation lock on/off manually. It's ages apart. Even Apple's implementation to me is pretty rock solid. I would prefer that over Samsung's given that Samsung will waste your battery by using the front camera, but Samsung's solution is the most elegant and hands free (not just not having to press anything, but not to even have to THINK about it)

 

[Zaap]

its zero clicks with this feature. plus you have to waste screen space to have a widget. you also need to be on that screen to click it.

Much ado about nothing. Pretending clicking a widget is a hardship is laughable. Not having to THINK or move one's lazy self isn't a big priority for everyone.

And like I said, there's a toggle on the drop down notifications on the SGS3, accessible anywhere on the device.

Most reading apps have a simple selection for selecting auto-rotate, locked portrait or landscape.

Next people will be arguing "OMG! Moving your finger to press a control is too hard!!! I want a device that needs an always running app using my camera to sense when I'm about to move my finger so that it automatically guesses what I'm about to press and does it for me!"

Like someone else said: first world 'problems'.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Much ado about nothing. Pretending clicking a widget is a hardship is laughable. Not having to THINK or move one's lazy self isn't a big priority for everyone.

And like I said, there's a toggle on the drop down notifications on the SGS3, accessible anywhere on the device.

Most reading apps have a simple selection for selecting auto-rotate, locked portrait or landscape.

Next people will be arguing "OMG! Moving your finger to press a control is too hard!!! I want a device that needs an always running app using my camera to sense when I'm about to move my finger so that it automatically guesses what I'm about to press and does it for me!"

Like someone else said: first world 'problems'.

I'm not saying anything is too hard. It's relatively more work than something easier. Why are you so against making life easier?

Let's make things hard for the sake of making things hard:

- Why do we have notification toggles now? Samsung pioneered it. CM embraced it. Nah, it's a useless feature. Strip it out. People can't do 4 extra clicks going into the Settings menu to change things?

- Why do we even have auto rotation? We should force users to rotate the screen on their own with a button.

- Camera detects orientation of your phone and sets orientation of image. Nah, let's disable that. When people upload hundreds of photos to Picasa or Google+ or Google instant upload, make them do it all on their own.

- Google+'s instant upload is useless. So is Dropbox. Let's force them to upload it on their own.

- Why the hell does Google have a share button on everything? People should manually open gmail and hit attach if they want to share a photo. They should open the Facebook app on their own to post a photo. Why have that share button? What? opening Facebook is THAT HARD?

- Why do we even have a notification bar? People should keep track of their notifications themselves. They should remember when their phone pinged them about Facebook, and email and remember to open those apps on their own in that order to go through their notifications. Yeah, iOS users would be better ditching the notification center for their horrible iOS 4 and older notification.

- Why the hell does Siyah kernel for SGS2 and 3 have a dual boot feature? People can't do Nandroid backups, full wipes, install new ROM, wipe, Nandroid back, and waste 30 minutes just so they can test out a ROM?

- iPhone's quick camera shortcut was stupid. Not sure why Android adopted it too. Maybe because people like taking photos? And with the lack of a hardware key, they have to find their camera shortcut or have one on their main screen, or launch the app drawer if it weren't for this unlock. Yeah let's make people do that. Why let them quickly access the camera on their home screen?

I can play that game too. Each feature I mentioned makes our lives easier just a little bit. When you improve every feature, then you shorten the amount of time people need to waste doing trivial things.

Rotating a screen is a trivial task. With so much computational power, it'd be nice if that was taken care of for you.

 

[Zaap]

Don't get all drama queen over it. You are the absolute master of hyperbole and silly exaggerations when it comes to mobile devices.

No one said strip it out, just "not really needed" and "semi-pointless" since there are easier ways to do the same thing that are completely fool-proof. (Camera-sensor thing in low light sounds completely hit-and-miss as many of these gimmicky features often are. Toggling rotate on and off works 100% every time and uses no resources.)

And I might remind you, you're the one who often dismisses things that actually are useful, like widgets and NFC. Those actually can be used for tasks that other solutions can't do anywhere near as efficiently, yet here you are going off on tangents over some gimmicky feature that has any number of easier, better ways to achieve.

But by all means, get back to your drama over it.