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Originally Posted by SanFrancisco
I am actually quite surprised Apple would go with this given the list of failures where this technology has been employed.
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What about iPod's? They have long used touchwheels, and very good ones at that. People love them. We all thought iPod's would not survive, but we were wrong.
The Apple multitap touchscreen technology solves a lot of problems
- It turns off when brought up to face
- It automatically filters out touches that don't feel like a finger (people hate those). The multitap technology reads a 2D grid snapshot of what's touching the screen, and only registers on finger-shaped touches.
- You can actually rest your hand on it and still tap a part of the screen; it will ignore the rest of your hand. You can write using a stylus with your hand resting on screen. (People hate touchscreens that only require one point of contact)
- You can do things like pinch-slide your fingers on the screen, in order to zoom in-and-out of a webpage. (That's how it works for zooming web browser graphics and Google Maps)
- Multitap technology supports onscreen touchwheels, so it can behave like an iPod with an iPod Classic skin...
Apple has done some really amazing stuff with this touchscreen. I don't even own any Apple product but this may be the first Apple product I buy.
I will, however, be keeping my BlackBerry, and be using the iPhone as a PDA -- I might even be able to use the Bluetooth connection of my BlackBerry for the data usage on the iPhone. (I'm betting the OS X on this device is flexible enough for this).
It also plays DVD quality video so should be a great personal video player too (The iPhone plays 640x480 video compressed at megabit-league H.264 perfectly smoothly! That's HDTV-like for a handheld device.)
Yes, I prefer a phone with real keyboard/keypads, but I have got to say, Apple appears to have massively improved the touchscreen so that it's finally no longer inconvenient... From what it appears, it shockingly a jack-of-all-trades master-of-all (appears it does great video, great photos, great PDA, great electronic notepad, in a tiny device) No doubt some glitches, but blows away an iPaq and Palm LifeDrive when I need something more media friendly than a BlackBerry...
I'm not even interested in this gadget for its phone capabilities... (I'm deaf anyway.)
May not be for another 6 months till I get my hands on one of these Apple PDA's.... I think it is probably going to sell out like Wii's.