I’m a fan of capacitive touch, like on the iPhone. I like the natural nature of sliding the fingers across the screen to make things happen. I was talking with a Lenovo rep the other day and he challenged my belief that you can only get this capability on a capacitive touch. He showed me the touch on the new Lenovo X61 for instance. He could slide his finger across it easily to select a region on the desktop. No awkward pressing hard.
What I learned was that it’s not just the fact whether a digitizer is capacitive or not. It’s the quality of the digitizer. Evidently there are high-quality resistive technologies that can give you a smooth experience. Lenovo appears to be using it.
I haven’t tried one UMPC/MID though that comes as close to what I want however. (I have seen a Toshiba UMPC-ish protoype running at CES 2008 that came close. But I wasn’t allowed to touch it to verify.) I wisht he manufactures realized that just because something is small it shouldn’t be made cheap.
Now two-point touch or multi-touch is another matter. There are tons of possibilities here on the product side if only we could see some progress on the hardware and driver side. Will multi-touch give the edge to capacitive? I don’t know. But I’m getting tired of waiting for the hardware folks to catch up here. Are they waiting for Microsoft to do something on the SDK side? If so, let’s get moving! Enough sleeping at the wheel.
Update: Ooops. Several people let me know that I had my Lenovo’s backwards. I fixed the typo. Sorry about that.