The big thing about touchscreen mobile phones is that, theoretically, they do away with all the old frustrations of mobile user interfaces, heralding a new dawn of tactile touch navigation. Or something like that. The iPhone has done a pretty good job, but other handset manufacturers are trying to figure out how they can improve on Apple’s UI.
LG’s solution? Hold a competition for designers to come up with a new mobile UI, with a $14,000 prize. Check out the winning entry. It’s called ‘Driving’, and it’s an on-screen steering wheel. I wouldn’t fancy text messaging with that, but imagine playing a driving game…
(via Engadget Mobile)
I think its fair to say that the iPhone’s touchscreen interface has got mobile developers a bit excited. Pointui Home is the latest attempt at emulating that multi-touch magic on a non-Apple phone - in this case for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 handsets..
How well does it do? Surprisingly enough, it’s not bad. I ran it on a Treo 750v and despite a couple of little problems (such as the old home screen periodically trying to reassert itself) I found it to be a really slick, intuitive interface.
Your new home screen will have a row of application icons at the bottom, a few ’status’ icons at the top (for battery, connectivity, etc) and a central area that can display a clock, inbox, tasklist, etc.
Everything is designed to be easy to operate with the finger, rather than the stylus, although I did have to use the edge of a fingernail to make more precise taps, such as selecting a scroll bar.
Views can be changed by sliding your finger towards screen edges, and new screens glide into view with a pleasing smoothness.
Ok, there is no actual multi-touching going on (this is a limitation of the hardware, really) but as Pointui Home is free it’s definitely worth checking out and might make using your WinMo phone a bit more fun if nothing else.
The Boy Genius certainly seems to think so, posting this picture, which the site claims is an accurate render of the upcoming HTC Juno.
Said to sport a version of the HTC Touch’s TouchFLO interface, the Juno is a Windows Mobile 6-based handset with a slide-out keypad that may (if our squinting is right) offer a QWERTY key set.
Other specs are a bit vague, with talk of a 2MP camera and microSD card slot. However, CrunchGear is betting on a US debut for the Juno on AT&T, with T-Mobile to follow in 2008, while BGR reckons the latter will get it first sometime in October.
Multi-touch sensing, the tech that lurks within the iPhone’s shiny exterior, just took a step-up in quality with the arrival of this new display panel from Sharp.
Instead of overlaying a touch-sensitive film as other displays have done, Sharp’s panel features embedded optical sensors, like you’d find in a scanner, behind every pixel on the display. This means you get both great accuracy in the sensing and a clearer image, because there’s nothing sitting on top of the LCD display.
Running at 320 x 480 pixel resolution (double QVGA rez), the 3.5″ Sharp panel’s sensors can also handle all the multi-touch loveliness we’re going to expect as standard when the unit starts shipping in volume in spring 2008. Sweet.
(Via CrunchGear)
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