Nokia S60 Touch phone comes with perfect tactile touchscreen?
November 7, 2007 by Dario Soltani
Nokia has developed a super high tech tactile touchscreen and it will be used on the coming S60 Touch. Sounds familiar? Think again! Nokia’s touchscreen is not like other cheap imitations like the iPhone. When you click on the screen using your finger (or a stylus), it clicks under your finger, apparently the sensation is just like when pushing a key on a conventional keyboard. Hallelujah!
Nokia’s engineers have inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and made the screen move 0.1mm when touched. Sounds easy huh? Well it’s taken them 10 years to develop this technology codenamed Haptikos, the hardest part being fine tuning the movement and response to mimic the exact sensation of pressing real keys.
Red at redferret.net has tested a prototype and says "In use, the touch feedback on the demo device was near on perfect. Each press of a key returned a clunky click and tactile snap on the touchscreen, which made typing feel incredibly responsive and very usable on the smooth screen surface. In fact it was hard to remember that you were using a touchscreen keyboard."
The next challenge before the big release is to provide exact tactile replicas for scrolling and draw/paint applications. At the moment I have no information on how they will solve this problem, but it’s apparent scrolling and painting requires a whole different sensation.
Via redferret.net
How on earth can you have a headline “Nokia S60 touch phone comes with…” when the phone doesn’t yet exist? I’m sure that the prototype screen that they showed on the N810 was fantastic and it will be really cool when it comes out, but it’s not honest to say that a non-existent phone “comes with” anything.
Yes Weisen, I might have got a little overexcited when I wrote that headline, I’m
quoting Red who got a personal demonstration from Roope Takala, Senior Program Manager at Nokia’s research labs.
Red wrote:
‘The new Haptikos technology will apparently be shipped with the
upcoming Nokia S60 Touch phone that has been shown off at recent demos…‘
Read his story at http://www.redferret.net/?p=9533.
But you got a point, things can change and we will not now anything for sure until we’ve seen a final product. I’ve added a question mark to the headline.
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