Touch Screen

The Amazon Kindle Touch is quite a remarkable little machine. In many ways, it can be seen as a halfway point between the Fourth Generation Kindle e-Reader and the Kindle Fire Tablet. However, it's not simply a glorified reader, nor is it a stripped down tablet. Rather, it is another way in which Amazon is building on its lead in the e-Reader market by optimizing the reader interface and user controls. With the Kindle Touch sure to find its way under many a tree this holiday season we put the device through its paces with a hands-on review. Read More

Undergraduate student, Adam Duran, made excellent use of his time at Stanford University, where he attended a two-month summer course organized by the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). Together with his mentors, Adrian Lew and Sohan Dharmaraja, he created a potentially game changing application that should make the lives of visually impaired people both easier and less expensive. The application turns a tablet into a Braille writer and thus saves the blind from having to purchase a device that may cost up to ten times more than a tablet. Read More

Taking on the idea that daily smartphone use can create automatic touch recall, just like touch typing on a keyboard, students at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, have created the "imaginary phone" concept that turns the palm of a hand into a smartphone touch interface. Using spatial memory built up while operating the physical device to remember gestures and the relative position of icons on the phone, users can perform simple smartphone tasks without even taking it out of your pocket. Read More

Those of us who grew up in the 70s or 80s may remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Instead of reading the book straight through, from cover to cover, at the bottom of each page you were presented with a choice like, “If you decide to open the treasure chest, turn to page 24 / If you decide to go farther into the cave, turn to page 32.” Interactive movies follow the same model, except the viewer’s choices result in seeing different scenes instead of reading different pages. While such films have been around since the invention of video disc players, a new one from Israel uniquely incorporates today’s technology. Read More

A faster and more natural text input app for small devices, which mimics handwriting and eliminates typos. Sounds good? That is what the 8pen app for Android touch phones offers. Read More

Light Blue Opitcs (LBO) has won the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Innovation Awards 2010 prize for Product Design with its Light Touch interactive projector. The device uses an infra-red touch sensing system that transforms a projected image into a virtual 10-inch touch screen. It allows users to interact with multimedia content and applications by touching the image, which can be projected onto any flat surface. Read More

There are several options out there for those looking to use capacitive touchscreen devices while not getting frosty fingers this winter. We've looked at the North Face Etip and Agloves, now a solution that is cheap, simple and lets you keep wearing your favorite pair of gloves – even while tweeting how cold you are! Read More

Are you the sort of person who loves touch screen technology but yearns for the mechanical feel and security of a real keyboard? You may be interested to hear that Toshiba’s Libretto w100 dual touch-screen mini notebook will be the first device to hit the market that incorporates Immersion Corporation’s TouchSense 2500 solution that provides touch feedback effects when hitting keys. The haptic effects help to minimize the chance of mis-keying, provide immediate tactile response and allow you to get all touchy and feely at the same time. Read More

Fujitsu has announced the release of multi-input resistive touch panels with the ability to detect simultaneous inputs. This means that potentially you could have input coming from your finger and from a stylus at the very same time. While multi-touch is nothing new to most readers (especially those with a taste for Apple products), it should be clarified that this functionality is normally associated with capacitive touch screens and not resistive panels like these new ones from Fujitsu. Read More