September 26th, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
When looking to dazzle your friends with humorous examples of oxymorons, make sure you insert Alps Electric’s new “Non-Contact Touchpad” right after “military intelligence” and before “jumbo shrimp” (that last one always gets ‘em laughing). Alps’ prototype (shown without the hand model after the break) breaks linguistic and laptop convention by letting you control your machine with fingers waving about an inch above it. Right now it seems to have limited precision, with one sensor on either side of a rather more traditional pad picking up digits as they move from left to right or in a circle. So, touch-free retouching of images in Photoshop isn’t quite possible yet, but with a few years of refinements anything is possible.
Continue reading Alps Electric’s “non-contact touchpad” needs no touch
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Posted in laptop, prototype, touchpad, input device, InputDevice, alps electric, AlpsElectric, non-contact touchpad, Non-contactTouchpad | No Comments »
August 31st, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
There are two kinds of Dell rumors: sure things, and ones that aren’t sure things. This one falls in the latter camp, so proceed with caution. We’ve got a tipster who says a friend of his from Dell handed him this shot of what is purportedly a new XPS M1330 / M1530 design. As you can see, pretty much the same old fare… but what’s this? A large glossy touchpad? Here’s our hunch: Dell is tired of drawing inspiration from Apple after the fact, and decided to turn the tables by capitalizing on one of the most persisten (and outlandish) Apple rumors in existence. A good capacitive touchscreen for the trackpad on a laptop would undoubtedly be a blast if it was done right, with the right software support, and at least seems like a good gimmick. Or maybe it’d just be lame. We won’t go further than that, this could just as easily be a Photoshop, but we will be keeping an eye out.
Update: False alarm, turns out this is just a still from an NVIDIA Tegra demo on YouTube. Thanks, shiv, for pointing this out in comments. Boo, tipster, boo.
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Posted in dell, touchscreen, touchpad, m1330, xps m1330, XpsM1330, M1530, xps m1530, XpsM1530 | No Comments »
August 15th, 2008 by
Filed under: Laptops
If the increasing number of posts on the MSIWind.net forums are any indication, it looks like at least some MSI Winds are now shipping out with Sentilic touchpads in place of the more-functional Synaptic ones that have been standard issue until now. Among other things, the Sentilic touchpads don’t allow for horizontal and vertical side scrolling (instead offering just corner clicking), and they apparently don’t let you turn off the tap-to-click feature, which seems to have caused plenty of frustation among those that have received a Wind from this latest batch. For its part, MSI only seems to be offering an updated driver to anyone that contacts them complaining of problems which, not surprisingly, apparently doesn’t do much to improve things.
[Thanks, Stephen P]
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Posted in touchpad, msi, MSI Wind, MsiWind, sentilic, synaptic | No Comments »
February 21st, 2008 by
Filed under: Cellphones
Just when you think you’ve seen the iPhone perform its last magic trick (making you eggs benedict, solving the inverse Galois problem, a brief appearance on Dancing With the Stars) something like this comes along to make your jaw drop just a little bit more. Touchpad for the iPhone is built on top of VNsea, but instead of allowing you to navigate your desktop on the device, it becomes what is essentially a wireless, remote trackpad, which gives you direct access to your system as if you were using a mouse or touch device for input. It sounds interesting in description, but looks amazing in execution — check the video after the break to see what it does, then go get the app loaded up and try it yourself.
Continue reading Touchpad turns your iPhone into a remote trackpad
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Posted in iPhone, remote, touchpad, vnc, remote desktop, RemoteDesktop, trackpad, vnsea | No Comments »
