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Sharp announces new optical-sensing touchscreen display – better than iPhone multi-touch screen

By: , IntoMobile
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 12:46 AM

Sharp announces new mutli-touch LCD display based on optical sensors built into teh LCDMulti-touch is like sliced bread. Sure, bread has been around for hundreds, nay thousands of years. But it took the innovation of pre-sliced bread to show us how bread was meant to be eaten. In the same vein, touchscreens have been around for years,  but multi-touch showed us what touch-screens are really all about. Multi-touch is the new standard when it comes to touch-screen devices – it really takes the touch-screen concept to a new, intuitive level. It makes sense for electronics-manufacturers to develop even better technology to leverage the multi-touch idea.

Sharp has announced a new touchscreen LCD  that not only rivals the iPhone’s multi-touch display (manufactured by Balda), but blows it out of the water. The new tech is based on optical sensors built right into the display, as opposed to the Balda-made screen’s capacitive technology. Sharp claims that this results in a display that is not only thinner (1 mm – making more room for advanced components and allowing for slimmer devices), but can actually double as an optical scanner. Think part multi-touch display, part portable business card/bar code scanner – how cool is that? With optics-based input that’s sensitive enough for multi-touch gestures and flexible enough to scan text, Balda had better get to developing their own next-gen display.

Samples should start shipping in Spring of 2008. Could we see the iPhone v2.0 rocking a Sharp-made multitouch display that can scan our bar codes? We sure hope so. But, then again, we’d rather just have some good-old 3G connectivity.

[Via: Electronista]

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About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • Michael

    :twisted:
    Doubt that Sharp could ever manufacture something as complicated as Balda’s screen, and if they could, then Nokkia would certainly not agreed to an 8 Million unit deal with Balda. If Nokia don’t buy this tech, neither do I.

  • Thaddeus

    Ya, it’s pretty cool, but how is it better? Why is it practical to have a bar code scanner built into a PDA or Smart phone? What average grocery store employ who needs to check up on their lucky charms prices uses their phone/bar code scanner? Does it also have all the information for every product that has a bar code on it in the world? Optical sensing touch screens require a camera, which if screwed up, will obviously screw your device. What’s the problem with the iPhone’s not bar code scanning touch screen; which just so happens to be near invincible as well as innovative? If you new anything about what a optical sensing touch screen was you wouldn’t be judging on the ability to scan 3 inch documents and barcodes.