Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

TrueTouch Lets You Hover to Control Your Touchscreen

by Amar Toor on April 26, 2010 at 09:41 AM

If a touchscreen responds to a finger that doesn't actually touch it, is it still a touchscreen? Counterintuitive as it may seem, the answer is "yes." In a few months, people with a Nokia S60, Palm Pre or any other phone featuring a Cyprus touchscreen will be able to navigate their devices by simply hovering their fingers over the screen. A user will still make contact with the screen to execute a command, but the new TrueTouch hover technology will at least allow them to enlarge or highlight text, without smudging up the screen with fingerprints or grease stains. After the jump, check out a video of TrueTouch product manager Sherif Hanna demonstrating the sensors. Icons grow in size as a digit nears, and shrink as one pulls away.

Cyprus's technology looks cool enough, and would undoubtedly come in handy for examining small text, photos or protozoa. But we still derive a strangely visceral pleasure from actually touching our phones, and we've never really felt a strong urge to lessen that tactile interaction -- even as the fingerprints pile up. Astute observers will recall that Apple cited the lack of mouseover and hover detection on its iPad screen as one of the company's many excuses for not implementing Adobe Flash in the device. While Cyprus is obviously attempting to squeeze into a technological gap that the iPad has left vacant, a remote control magnifying glass does not an Apple-killer make. [From: DVICE, via: Slashgear]

Tags: cellphones, cyprus, nokia, palm pre, PalmPre, smartphone, top, touchscreen, truetouch

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular