Not sure what to think about it. Seems awesome at first glance but then the examples are skipping songs and hand waving pokemons. Feels a lot like a solution looking for a problem.
It seems like it'd work well in the general case of "I want to control a device that I can't touch". There's lots of reasons you wouldn't want to touch a device (dirty/non-free hands, device is out of reach, device doesn't have a screen, etc) and a lot of devices you'd want to control from afar (televisions, radios, speakers, AC units, alarm clocks, or arguably phones, I guess). It'll be interesting to see what uses emerge from that intersection once other kinds of devices get Soli.
I wonder if it'd be useful for more crazy ideas that fit into "giving a device more information about physical actions nearby" (like sleep tracking), but I don't know how realistic those are.
When you control volume you usually want to make it quiet and stay quiet - e.g. someone is sleeping but you want to continue working (moving) and you don't want to accidentally turn it back up.
The other time when you control volume is when you want to make it louder and then dance (moving) and you don't want the volume to jump up and down.
Only other case that I can think of is when you want to turn the volume up or down just a tiny bit, which actually seems like the worst use case for this technology.
It does send millimetre waves though, could that mean we could hack Soli to view through clothes ? Like a full-body scanner works ?
That being said, the website near the bottom show cases finer controls, such as scrolling and turning a dial. I could see these being added in the future for finely controlling some UI elements without your finger blocking the way.
Even then, your hands might be busy here and a voice interaction may be better.
It makes more sense to upgrade the kitchen equipment to provide this functionality.
But then again, I don't see a point in sending all of my movements to a server in cloud just so I can scroll down a recipe.
I read somewhere (will look for source when I get time), that when Thomas Edison invented phonograph, he believed there wouldn't be no other use for it than to listen to sermons at home.
I believe this __could__ over time revolutionize HCI and perhaps gaming.
Or using the chip to try to provide a consistent music playing volume when you do something in a room that involves moving closer and farther from the speakers.
That said, I agree, I can't come up with anything that's truly useful and not just some over-engineered comfort thing.
Although that's a lot of tech for such a minor thing.
Because you don't want to extract it from your backpack/purst first? Or you are lying in the dark avoiding turning the backlight on but you also badly want to skip that terrible song you hate...
edit: or you're presenting and using your phone on the podium as a remote without breaking eye contact/physically fiddling with the phone/laptop.
These are minor, but not negligible. My phone gets very smudged up throughout the day.
I think I agree with the rest of your list, except for this one. While the transition to USB-C is painful, I think the world of consumer devices will be better off for it in the end.