South Korea's Samsung Electronics said it had developed the world's first mobile phone with motion-recognition capabilities.

The SCH-S310 phone allows users to dial by waving the phone to write numbers in the air instead of pressing a keypad, Samsung said.

Users could also delete unsolicited commercial text messages by shaking the phone up and down.

The new device used a "six-axis sensor" that could interpret simple human gestures, Samsung said.

The phone's makers said it opened up a way for people to interact with their phones more naturally.

The SCH-S310 phone with a 1.3-megapixel camera and digital music player would be released in South Korea in March.

Samsung described the new phone as the most innovative of its latest product offerings.

These have included a mobile phone with a five-megapixel digital camera and the world's first mobile phone with the capability to convert spoken words into text messages.