Nokia Kinetic offers a new form of smartphone interaction

Nokia World 2011 hasn't just been about the Lumia line-up of Windows Phone 7 devices, as the Future Technology booth at th Expo prooved with the practical use of a flexible display on a smartphone.

Called the Kinetic (because of the way users are supposed to interact with it) the device responds to every bend, twist and contortion in the form of navigating throught UI.  Of course, this idea isn't properly baked yet, as the demo unit is simply a rather nice AMOLED display and the plastic casing (no phone functionality or capacitive touch on the screen); but it shows for an extremely pleasing user experience, and a bright future for innovation at Nokia. 

Zooming in and out of images is done by simply bending the phone's sides back and bringing the middle towards you for the former, and doing the opposite for the latter.  A twisting maneuvre controls scrolling through selections and songs and selection is simply a case of doing the same action as zooming in.  It's really weird to describe, and something that does sound rather unpleasant on first read.  But it's an actual realisation of another form of phone interaction that has the absolute ease that came with the introduction of the capacitive touchscreen.  It took only a few seconds to adapt to, and it has all the user satisfaction through feeling in direct control you could ever want.  I mean bend-to-zoom isn't that far away from pinch-to-zoom in terms of intuitiveness (infact we thought it was a couple steps ahead in terms of human fluidity).

See a video demo below, courtesy of The Nokia Blog: