Smartphones with Touch Free Touch Screens
—Nowadays just about any smartphone features a touchscreen. Touchscreen technology has also improved greatly over recent times. Resolutions have improved, as have sensitivities, and all the smartphone manufacturers have striven to respond to the wishes of their customers in order to improve the touchscreen user interface. However, a completely new kind of touchscreen is just around the corner and this is the touch free touchscreen.
If a touchscreen that you don’t have to touch sounds inconsistent, then we should explain that we don’t mean that the user still operates the phone by gestures of the fingers and thumbs, but no physical contact is involved.
The first patent on this new technology was filed by Apple and we can expect to see something like it on future generations of the iPhone. The phone has infrared light emitting diodes behind the touchscreen and use reflected invisible light to determine the presence and motion of the user’s hands.
Another company has independently produced an alternative technology that responds to sweeping gestures made over the screen. This uses sweeping for turning pages of stored information and for surfing the web and instead of using reflected light, it uses ultrasound. The screen has an invisible array of ultrasound sources and detectors and uses these to detect hand movements.
In addition to increasing the functionality of smartphones, there are many occasions when sweeping gestures would be preferable to touching, for instance if using your phone with greasy fingers.
These new touch free screens are still in their infancy and the initial demonstrations of the technology are still only concepts, even the technologists developing are unsure of how they will be used in practice, but it is fairly certain that these will be incorporated into smartphones of the future.
Are you looking for a new mobile phone? You can browse a huge collection of cheap mobile phones at Dial A Phone today so visit the website and take a look.
Posted 1/12/11
