Microsoft"s Kinect gesture-based controller is getting some competition in the smartphone industry. AllThingsD.com reports that Pantech will be putting such motion gesture features inside their Vega LTE-based smartphones. These products will be released in Pantech"s native Korea sometime in November. Pantech recently entered the US market with smartphones such as Verizon"s Pantech Breakout device.
As you can see in the video above, the motion gesture features allow users to answer the Pantech smartphone when they cannot touch them with their fingers due to, for example, working with some batter in the kitchen. Such features could also be used to answer a phone while driving a car or if the user is using gloves. The gesture technology for the Pantech Vega comes from eyeSight Mobile Technologies, based in Israel.
Microsoft"s own Kinect technology has so far only appeared in one product. The Xbox 360 Kinect game accessory was first used for playing console games and since its launch one year ago, Kinect"s support has since been expanded: Microsoft allowed it to be used for non-commercial purposes via a Windows SDK earlier this year. Today Microsoft announced that tools to create commercial Kinect applications would be released in early 2012.
However we wouldn"t be surprised if future versions of smartphones that use Microsoft"s Windows Phone operating system would also support gesture features based on the Kinect technology. It seems like a natural extension of both the Kinect brand and for Microsoft"s future technology plans in general.