Touchscreen Phones Coming Soon: End of the Stylus?
Now this is an interesting piece of technology. I feel that one of the major limitations of PDAs and PDA-Phones is the required presence of a tool called … the stylus. This just makes it too cumbersome to use. Having to cradle and uncradle the style every time you use the PDA or PDA-Phone is not exactly efficient. However, current PDA touchscreens are just not enough for plain finger use. So for many years, the stylus survives.
Well this maker of laptop touchscreens is releasing a technology called ClearPad. This vision of the future of mobile by Synaptic looks pretty realistic. I, for one, would like to see the number of button presses be reduced with richer interaction via a touchscreen.
It appears that there is the ability to interact directly with the OS at virtually every point on the surface of the device and this is part of what makes the material an interesting candidate for use in portable devices. Beyond being very durable and virtually impervious to water or dust or wear and tear, the Synaptics capacitative touch pads are generally much thinner than mechanical controls and offer far greater sensitivity as an additional bonus.
Imagine being able interact with the phone by using every surface of the handset. Now, this opens the mobile to a number of interesting interfacing options. Check out the PR article about this interesting concept phone by Synaptic.
