Microsoft Lumia 950 originally had gestures that made it much 'smarter'

To many, the launch of Microsoft's Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 40 was somewhat of a disappointment. While both devices were an improvement over previous Windows phones, they did very little to stand up out from the balance of the market place. Sure, they had great cameras for the time, just any positives in the hardware at launch were quickly overshadowed by buggy software, nearly of which did not get resolved until several months into the product'due south lifecycle.

The devices that shipped in November 2022 were non the devices Microsoft had originally planned. During development, in an endeavor to stabilize the platform, Microsoft cut several notable hardware and software capabilities, including pen support, and avant-garde hardware gestures. While pen support is pretty self-explanatory, the removed gesture support is much more interesting.

Hands-on with Lumia 950 gestures

Early Lumia 950 prototypes featured what Microsoft internally referred to as "active sides." These early on prototypes featured capabilities that allowed the phone to sense the sides of the handset, which enabled all kinds of additional functionality in the form of gestures. This functionality was initially worked on with the Lumia McLaren, a device that was canceled over a year earlier the Lumia 950 shipped.

I recently got my hands on ane of these early Lumia 950 prototypes, which came with a working pre-release version of these gestures. Information technology appears Microsoft was going to use gestures to make the Lumia 950 "smarter."

Microsoft was plainly building this functionality into an app chosen Touch on & Gestures, which ended up aircraft as just Touch. You can find the Touch app in the extras area in Settings on your Lumia 950. In early on prototypes, this app also had an surface area dedicated to gestures, with Microsoft describing the feature as allowing the user to "collaborate naturally with your phone."

Every unmarried gesture that Microsoft was working on could be turned on or off, pregnant if you didn't like some of the gestures, you didn't have to use them. There are five different categories of gestures, with a total of 17 specific gestures for the user to enable:

Wake up the telephone.
Screen and keyboard.
Phone call handling.
Ringtone and alerts.
Cortana.

Here's a quick rundown of each gesture per-category.

Wake upwards the phone

There are only two gestures nether this category, the first of which is something that shipped: Double-tap to wake. The other gesture enabled the ability to testify the glance screen when you choice upwardly the phone, kind of like lift to wake.

Screen and keyboard

There are 4 gestures under this category, all of which are designed to make using the phone easier. The first gesture is to "continue the screen on when I'm holding the phone." When enabled, the screen will non dim or go to sleep when you are holding the device, meaning you don't demand to go along tapping on the brandish every thirty seconds to forbid it from going off.

The second gesture is more useful to me. When enabled, the device can notice which orientation you're using the phone, and lock or unlock motorcar rotate based on whether it makes sense to exercise and then. For example, if I'one thousand property the phone regularly and I go to lay down, the phone won't flip the screen effectually equally it assumes I'm yet using the phone in portrait mode, which I usually am.

The other two gestures are for the keyboard, which when enabled let the user double-tap either side of the phone to dock the keyboard to the right or left of the screen. This ane would brand more sense on the Lumia 950 XL variant.

Call handling

There are five gestures in this category, most of which are run of the factory. The first iii are all almost answering and hanging upward calls, such as raising the phone to your ear to answer an incoming call, flipping the phone onto its screen to ignore it, and putting the phone in your pocket to hang up a call.

The other two are all about speaker style. When enabled, yous tin can put the telephone downward onto a table to automatically turn on speaker style, and yous can also set information technology so phone calls automatically answer in speaker style when you press reply without holding the phone.

Ringtone and alerts

This category is a continuation of the one in a higher place and includes an additional five gestures. The offset 2 are about silencing incoming calls, allowing you to silence the call when you lot concord the phone, or when you cover the screen. The other 3 gestures are for alarms, which lets you lot flip the phone over, concord the phone, or cover the screen to silence an alarm.

Cortana

This is the concluding category, which includes only one additional gesture. This gesture is a unique i, which I think would convince more people to utilise their digital assistants if it was bachelor on more than phones. This gesture will activate Cortana when the user raises the phone to their ear.

And so, instead of opening the Cortana app and pressing the microphone push to begin speaking, yous hold the phone to your ear and start talking instead. Cortana will answer your request in the earpiece, and then nobody has to know that you're speaking to an AI.

What could have been ...

When in employ, all of these gestures make the Lumia 950 feel like a much smarter handset. The phone knows when I'm belongings information technology so that it doesn't auto rotate when I don't need it to and will stop ringing if a phone call comes in and I'm already holding the device. It'southward the niggling things similar this that make using a phone pleasant, and the Lumia 950 didn't have whatever of that when it launched.

Information technology'due south a shame these gestures never made it into the final product. Fifty-fifty today, about of these gestures aren't bachelor on even the top-end Android phones. Using gestures to make the telephone piece of work for you is an excellent fashion of enhancing productivity when using the phone. Hopefully, Microsoft's hereafter mobile efforts include this type of functionality.

What are your thoughts on these canceled features? Let us know in the comments.