Glove-Friendly Capacitive Touchscreen Allows for Cold Weather Pinch and Zoom

Hitachi Displays has developed an evolution to capacitive touchscreens that will allow the finger-friendly screens to recognize touch input even when your fingers are covered by gloves. The screens can possibly show up on the next generation iPhone and iPad and are scalable between 3 and 10 inches. The news should be good for users of Android, webOS, iOS, and WIndows Phone 7 devices in colder climates where users would need to wear gloves. The screen technology allows for touch to be recognized with insulators, such as plastic pens, tarns, cloth, gloves, fingernails, and other materials. Most notably, the glove-friendly screen could serve as a hybrid between resistive screen technology with stylus use and pen and ink input, and capacitive touch technology for finger-friendly operations. Perhaps we’ll see some form of inking again on an iPhone? Character recognition and old fashion handwriting as an alternative input from the software keyboard could make a comeback with support for plastic pens.

Casey Pham
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: Apple Inc, display, hitachi, iPad, iPhone, pen, stylus, touchscreen