Samsung phone recognises people, calls them
Dial and text pals from your picture gallery
Scrolling through your phone’s address book to find someone to call or text can be a chore. So Samsung has launched a cameraphone that lets you text or call by tapping on their photo.
Samsung's Haptic 8M: lets you call friends from pictures
Called "Face Tagging", the feature allows you to call or text someone by clicking on a photo, snapped by the Haptic 8M’s 8Mp camera. It works with almost any type of shot, even if your friend’s been snapped in a group picture, matching the snap against one you've already assigned to a contact.
Facial tagging is nothing new – Samsung’s 9Mp ST10 camera already sports a similar feature, allowing it to recognise the same individual within a number of pics.
The Haptic 8M’s camera also supports autofocus, business card recognition and smile snapping, with images displayed on a 3.3in touch-sensitive screen.
Given the phone’s name, we’d assume that the virtual keyboard is set-up for haptic feedback. An external memory card slot is built in too, and the phone includes Bluetooth.
An 8Mp camera, Bluetooth and TV reception all feature
Although there’s no mention of Wi-Fi support, the Haptic 8M does support HSUPA 3G speeds of up to 5.7Mb/s. Music playback hasn’t been mentioned, but Samsung said the phone can receive TV broadcasts.
Unfortunately, the Samsung Haptic 8M has only been inked for release in Korea so far – where it’ll cost roughly KRW900,000 (£456/$664/€489). ®
COMMENTS
The meh responses
Nice bit of fancy trickery, but suffers from one core problem.
Not an iIdea. It'll never take off...
Done already!
iPhone ... Faces app.
Nothing new here ... move along.
@AC 17:10GMT
AC I think you have it. The story clearly says that it's matching against photos already stored in the address book against your contacts. And then it says you have another photo, maybe even a group photo, and you click on a face in that photo and it searches your address book, finds a matching headshot and calls that person.
It's barely useful but there will be the odd occasion when you want to contact a person in your photo album - your example of wanting to send the picture to the person in the picture is probably about the best one.
But @Bassey has the ultimate answer - it's shiny and new. Barely useful but really cool.
I think (hope) you have missed the point
Shirley you're all very wrong. It means (god, i hope it means) that you are looking through your pictures, maybe of the night before, see a pic of a mate you snapped and think "Ah, i need to ring him about getting breakfast" and just tap their face on the picture you have. Not faster than a contacts list, but an extra convenience. live face recognition based calling is clearly not quite as useful.
I think tapping their face and having a "send this pic as MMS" option might be useful...
Seems pretty cool idea to me, and is only a proof of concept of more powerful things you can do with face recognition.
If I'm wrong then shoot me, but only after the dudes that built it.
@Interface
I thought it worked like this: You've got a photo of someone, let's say a family group photo, you point the phone at the person in the picture that you want to call at which point the phone recognises the face and calls ther person. I'm still calling 'Stop!' on this! Unless I really have missed the point.
As Bassey says though; shiny new thing. Who knows, it might turn into something useful one day.
I wonder if it works on the actual person too. So I can point the phone at ther person in front of me and it calls their phone (assuming, of course, I already have their number / photo). Now THAT would be pointless, but I'd still have to try it.
