Samsung will unveil the Galaxy S IV today at its event this evening at 7 PM ET in New York, but the cat is pretty much out of the bag at this point, and new videos have surfaced (via SammyHub) to try to spoil any remaining surprise. The Galaxy S IV videos depicts Floating Touch, SmartPause, the new unlock screen and the GSIV’s new web browsing experience.
Floating Touch works essentially like its name would suggest, allowing a user to get tooltips and other information by hovering a finger over the surface of the screen, rather than with direct touch input. In the video, it’s shown being used to bring up image previews, for example, without opening the image completely. Looks like it’ll take some getting used to, but we’ll wait until hands-on time to pass judgement.
With the Internet browsing experience, Samsung looks to have incorporated not head tracking features, but full hand gestures. The person using the phone in the video is seen using his hand to scroll the page he’s viewing up and down, and also to navigate back and forward in the browser. It looks pretty cool, but again there’s some question about how useful it’ll be in everyday applications.
The SmartPause feature looks like it could be all of what actually launches with the Galaxy S IV that constitutes so-called “eye tracking,” according to a Bloomberg report yesterday. Still, it looks impressive. Essentially, it can pause a video when a user turns away, which is useful if you’re watching something on your mobile device and get interrupted by a pesky coworker asking you to actually do something related to your “job.”
Finally, there’s the new unlock screen. Not much to say about this one, except that it appears to have Tinkerbell-style sparkle effects for tapping, and it unlocks with a swipe gesture.
Samsung had better have some things it kept extra close to the chest at this upcoming event tonight, or else it’ll face the wrath of a thousand tech bloggers who feel ‘disappointed’ because they weren’t surprised by anything. Still, some of these features could go over very big with developers, depending on whether third-parties can access and use these features: hand gestures and Floating Touch in particular might be very useful for game and app makers looking to add some secret sauce to their Google mobile software offerings for Samsung device owners.