14 DAY TRIAL // One of the appealing features that Sony Mobile’s Xperia sola smartphone was made available for purchase with was a brand new technology called Floating touch, which is now opened to app developers.
Through the new technology, Sony provided users with the possibility to control parts of handset’s UI through simply hovering their fingers over the screen.
A few weeks ago, the company announced the availability of a new platform release for the mobile phone, in the form of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, which also enabled it to make the Floating touch API available.
The platform release has already started to arrive on devices around the world, just as previously mentioned.
Through the release of the new API, the handset vendor opens the door for more application developers to include the feature in their software, thus providing Xperia sola users with an enhanced experience.
“Xperia sola is the first smartphone to introduce a brand new touch sensor technology called Floating touch. This unique feature lets you control parts of the user interface (UI) by simply letting your finger hover above the touch screen,” Sony explains.
“And with the latest Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update for Xperia sola, the API for Floating touch is now available, so that you can add Floating touch to your apps and allow users to control app actions through finger hovering.”
Through this feature, new means of interacting with the handset’s user interface are possible, and all of them can be included in mobile applications for the device as well.
Software developers interested in packing their applications with this feature should head over to this blog post on Sony Mobile’s website to learn more on the matter.
Andreas Sandblad, software architect at Sony, not only explains the API in detail there, but he also offers code samples and a tutorial for developers to take advantage of.