We take a look at the crucial parts of touchscreen technology for mobile devices, leading up to today's finger-based interaction. What's the ultimate touchscreen phone for you?
The basics of touchscreen technology is older than most of the people reading this site, and a number of technologies taking advantage of touchscreens in various ways have ultimately lead to what we're seeing today.
Especially the idea of handwriting recognition has lead to a large number of touchscreen solutions through the recent decades, with companies such as Apple and Palm being especially notable in the early history of mobile devices offering such functionality. To enable effective usage of handwriting recognition, handheld and smartphone manufacturers' use stylus-based touchscreens comprised of resistive touchscreen panels. Today, PhatWare CalliGrapher is a popular software upgrade for handwriting recognition on smartphones running Windows Mobile.
Simultaneously with the development of handwriting recognition software, however, a company called Tegic Communications developed a patented predictive text technology for mobile phones called T9 (Text on 9 keys). This technology is currently licensed to leading manufacturers such as Nokia, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
Among the new all-touch phones, T9 is often being used in combination with software keypads on touchscreens comprised of resistive touchscreen panels. Most of these phones are also offering interfaces that have been optimized, or partly optimized, for finger-based interaction, such as the HTC Touch Diamond on Sprint's network.
There are also a number of other touchscreen technologies available, and the most notable one for consumers right now is using capacitive touchscreen panels. While a resistive touchscreen requires the user to press together layers in the screen to register activity, a capacitive touchscreen senses activity by quickly registering the presence of a body part such as a finger; hence it's now being used for finger-based interaction on mobile devices.
The Apple iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 offer this new type of technology, though the T-Mobile G1 also incorporates a QWERTY thumbboard for text input.
Of course, an interaction technology that is based on hypersensitivity rather than what we normally think of as physically pressing something, offers some challenges. As soon as the device is sensing an incoming finger (the touchscreen's electrons meets your finger's electrons), things start happening. What strikes you as pure magic when performing some tasks (such as multi-touch gestures in the iPhone 3G), may become a disaster when dealing with traditional text input on a small on-screen keyboard on a small screen. Apple's solution to this problem is using automatic spell checking and correction as well as predictive text, and it works pretty well for Standard English as long as you remember the fact that how you move your finger prior to touching the screen is crucial here.
So, next time you go to your local electronics store to shop for touchscreen phones, remember that all touchscreen phones aren't the same. You've got touchscreen phones that are developed for stylus-based interaction, you've got touchscreen phones that are meant for usage of both stylus- and finger-based interaction in certain scenarios, and finally, you've got touchscreen phones primarily for finger-based interaction.
Our reviews will give you a good idea of which ones are doing what and how well they are doing it. And if you have your doubts about touchscreen phones when it comes to text input, but are still intrigued about the concept: Consider the smartphones that offer both touchscreens and QWERTY thumbboards.
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