Multi-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]