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Report: Amazon’s upcoming Android phone will use tilt gestures instead of menu buttons

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After sharing a first look and details at what is reportedly Amazon’s yet to be announced Android-based smartphone, BGR is out with another report today detailing other features of the upcoming device. On top of the specs shared last time— four IR cameras for a 3D interface, 13 MP camera, 4.7-inch display, and 2GB of RAM— today’s report goes into detail about how the device will use a unique navigation system that relies on physical tilting gestures opposed to traditional menu buttons:

By tilting the handset in different directions while the device is in use, Amazon’s interface will display additional information on the screen without the user having to touch or tap anything…In the phone’s email and calendar apps where small icons are displayed with no labels, a slight tilt will reveal labels beneath each icon, informing the user of its function. 

If the user performs a tilt gesture after searching for a restaurant in the maps app, Yelp ratings will appear on top of the various results plotted on the map… In Amazon’s video store, a tilt gesture displays IMDb ratings on top of movie thumbnails. And when viewing products on Amazon.com, gestures might cycle through images to reveal different product views.

The report goes on detailing similar tilting gestures for other core apps on the device such as tilting to scroll through pages in the Kindle app. The device will also apparently utilize optical character recognition and other technologies to let users capture images of text on real world objects and automatically convert it into, for example, a note, business card, or translation on the device.

Much more on how the Amazon phone will reportedly use tilting gestures for navigation at BGR.

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Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s weekly Logic Pros series and makes music as one half of Toronto-based Makamachine.