Users utilize the optical joystick key by placing their finger and moving a cursor to navigate through the menu, similar to a cursor of a mouse on a PC .

Sounds like a touch pad on your PC, doesn’t it? You place a finger on it and move the cursor around the screen.

Ever wondered how it actually works? After all, if you look at the picture, this “Optical Joystick” is no touch pad. It is just a small piece of transparent plastic that you can barely place a finger on. How on earth can it detect your finger movements and move the cursor on the screen accordingly?

Well, Samsung’s patent application for “Method for implementing a navigation key function in a mobile communication terminal based on fingerprint recognition” gives us a clue. The name says it all – Samsung’s SCH V960 Optical Joystick tracks your fingerprints to determine the navigational commands.

And this device really operates more like joystick, or a pointing stick on a Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks, then a traditional touch pad.

The first thing this device does – it scans your fingerprint and determines it’s position in the joystick area. Based on the place of where you fingerprint image is located the joystick can determine the movement direction – up, down, left, right.

Clever image processing algorithms allows to detect not only the placement of the finger but also the angle at which the finger is placed. Thus just by leaning the finger in particular direction you can make the cursor go there. Just like with a joystick or pointing stick.

It’s strange that Samsung did not talk about integrated fingerprint reader in press release. Otherwise Samsung V960 looks like a really cool phone but we’ll have to wait and try it out to see how well the optical joystick really works.
Another interesting thing about Samsung’s patent , it gives us a general idea of how long it takes Korean vendor to transform patentable invention into a real product. Samsung filed for U.S. patent on June 23, 2003 and application for Korean patent application was filed a year earlier. So it took Samsung about 40-50 moths to get from the idea to the actual phone.

Based on this time frame let’s see what other interesting phones can we expect from Samsung and when. Well,I don’t know with what gadgets Samsung will suprise us next year. But I can speculate about 2008. Based on 40-50 month time frame sometime that year we might get Samsung’s perfume phone and also Samsung cellphone with virtual input screen.

I say “Bring them on!”

• Samsung SCH V960 Optical Joystick Phone
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Samsung SCH-V960 slider phone similar to it’s slimmest slider Samsung D900 or high speed 3.5G HSDPA multitasking capable Samsung SCH-W200. But it’s got one really cool new feature – optical joystick, that tracks the movements of the users’ finger placed on it.

Since optical sensors embedded in Samsung SCH-V960 optical joystick phone can read users’ finger movement, the navigation through the cellphone screen and menus becomes much more easy. Instead of traditional four way movements through different menu items now you can move the cursor around the screen with 360 degrees of freedom. With optical joystick navigation interface becomes much like your PC Screen. You can easily select and click on different menu items, scroll through playlist while listening to music, control game characters or rearrange things on the screen however you like.

Samsung SCH-V960 Optical Joystic Phone also comes “Smart Lighting” feature that automatically adjusts the brightness of LCD screen and backlighting of keypad to the environmental conditions thus saving power and reducing eye strain.

And of course Samsung V960 has all other goodies necessary for todays cellphone – GPS module, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, MP3 player, microSD memory slot.

Currently Samsung SCH V960 Otical Joystick cellphone is designed for CDMA 2000 1X EVDO networks, but I think GSM version should be out there pretty soon too.

• Samsung SCH V960 Optical Joystick phone. How does it work?
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• Samsung: Let’s turn your clamshell into joystick !
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