Touchscreen Technologies

You might think that touchscreen technology has only really come into being ever since the release of the Tom Cruise thriller Minority Report back in 2002, but the ideas and the hardware which brings tactile interaction into being are much older. There is no doubt that touchscreen devices have become commonplace in the modern market thanks to the popularity of smartphones and now tablets and there are some exciting developments being forged by various companies.

Flexible touchscreens are the big news at the moment, with both Nokia and Samsung attempting to be the first to get them into consumer devices. At the Nokia World 2011 event the Finnish manufacturer showcased a working example of a smartphone with a flexible chassis and display. The fact that the screen can be bent and twisted is not just sensible to improve durability; it is an integral part of the way in which users will be able to interact with menus, apps and services. The phone can detect when it is bent and twisted, allowing users to skip through tracks when listening to music, exit apps or manipulate menus screens. Of course with touch sensitivity and an OLED screen the phone will be user-friendly in any case.

Samsung`s flexible touch screen displays go to an even greater extreme of malleability than those found on Nokia`s prototypes. While still using OLED technology, these screens are so thin and resilient that they can be rolled and folded hundreds of thousands of times in a row without having any impact on the quality of the image that is displayed.

While flexible touch screen displays are still some way from being available on a large number of devices, the next boundary for smartphones and tablets to cross comes in the form of resolution. At the moment even the high end handsets have resolutions of 800x480 or, in the case of the iPhone 4S, 960x640. However, the next generation of smartphones with higher resolutions and pixel densities on their touch screen displays is on the way.

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus will be one of the first smartphones to arrive with a touchscreen that features a native resolution of 1280x720, giving it the ability to show true 720p high definition content without compressing it. In addition BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion has recently announced that its upcoming overhaul of its smartphone range will endow its portable handsets with display resolutions of 1024x600, enabling a widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9. This shows that smartphones are beginning to stack up next to tablets when it comes to the quality of the touchscreens which they are given.

Of course the tablet market is not likely to stagnate from a display perspective, what with rumours suggesting that the Apple iPad 3 will be the first of its kind to get a Retina Display, providing similar boosts to the resolution and pixel density as were seen on the iPhone 4 back in 2010. It is speculated that this might exceed 2048x1536 pixels, which would definitely put it at the top of the touchscreen league tables.