Touchscreens with hover are near
If you have used devices like smartphones or UMPCs with passive digiters (touchscreens) and you’ve also used Tablet PCs with active digitizers you know that one of the useful functions you give up is the ability to hover. That’s where you move the digitizer pen over the screen and the cursor follows it around even though you’re not touching the screen, something you must do with passive digitizers to make something happen. Loren Heiny is playing the mage and telling us that hovering passive digitzers are on the way and that it will shake up the way we interface with our gadgets.
Called Projected Capacitive Touch Sensing, these new touchscreens will enable us to interact with the device by hovering our finger over the screen, much like the active digitizers on Tablet PCs. This technology is being employed in the iPhone, and we all know how cool that is. Loren links to a great article about this technology and how it will impact our mobile workstyle. Great stuff.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there already an HP all-in-one PC that lets you hover your finger above a passive screen? If it doesn’t support it, something must have been screwy, because I remember moving the cursor around without touching my fingertip to the screen.
HP IQ770
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128684-page,1-c,pcs/article.html