The Galaxy Beam Projector
Samsung had tried many things; the projector built-in into the Galaxy Beam Beam 2 ranks among the most gimmicky. These phones were mediocre in every way except for the projector. They were the only game in town if you needed a phone with a projector built-in. The projector added a lot of bulk; the picture was dim; the battery life was poor. You couldn’t even touch the phone without jiggling the projected image. Samsung never carried it into newer phones. The Moto Mod projector from Motorola is similarly lame, but wasn’t permanently attached to the phone.
HTC’s kickstarts
Fire One Dynamic Perspective
Another of Samsung’s less impressive gimmicks was Smart Scroll. This feature uses head tracking to let you scroll up and down by moving your head. It used the front-facing camera to watch for these movements, but it didn’t work very well. You had to move your head quite a bit to be anywhere close to reliable. At that point, it was easier to just use your finger to scroll. It only lasted for the Samsung Galaxy 4.
Motorola Skip
The original Moto X debuted some cool features like Moto Display and Moto Voice. Most of the features Motorola added to Android made a lot of sense. The Motorola Skip was not one of them. The Skip was a small magnetic clip with a non-writable NFC tag. After associating it with your phone, you can unlock the screen by tapping it. The idea was you’d clip it on your pocket or bag. Then drag the phone across it when taking it out. The main problem: it was not fast. You had to leave the phone touching the Skip for a second or two for it to work. Eliminating any benefit it offered. Motorola didn’t sell many of them. Eventually, it started dropping free Skips into unrelated orders. You can do the same thing now with Smart Lock and use the wearables to unlock phones.
Motorola Atrix Laptop Dock
The Motorola Atrix was unveiled at CES, drawing a lot of coverage thanks to the crazy laptop dock. When the phone was attached to the dock, it powered a Linux-based computing environment, which was a cool trick. It was not very useful in practice. The phone wasn’t fast enough to make the computer interface usable, and the dock was $500. You could get a real computer for that, even back in 2011.
Nextbit Smart Storage
Sony Ericsson Xperia Play
Yotaphone e-paper display
Samsung Continuum Ticker Panel
Ticker screens are a thing again, but Samsung did it years ago. However, it also did it terribly. The short-lived Samsung Continuum had a ticker screen at the bottom of the device, but it wasn’t a separate panel. The same AMOLED used on other Samsung phones at the time. But there was a bezel across the middle to separate the main ticker displays. The ticker could only display content from Samsung’s built-in apps, as if that wasn’t odd enough. Needless to say, Samsung did not make a Continuum 2.
