Touchscreens.

[Tsutarja]

Touchscreens. They're becoming more and more prominent around everything we use and everything we do in this day and age. Do you have any devices with touchscreens (even if it includes your Nintendo DS/DSi/3DS)? What are your thoughts on touchscreens in general?

 

[Drayton]

Imagine all laptops have touchscreens (Save money without buying Wireless mouse, easy gesture, use of fun functionally to offer). Sad thing is: Only Windows 8 support them.

But! Some touchscreen smartphones are bit fragile, Sony Xperia isn't durable as Samsung Note brand as touchscreen prune to scratches and rarely screen crack and make unfunctional again

 

[Cordelia]

Touchscreens have gotten quite good over the years. Resistive touchscreens (like in old phones, DS systems, and restaurants) really suck. They're the ones that aren't too responsive but you can touch them with anything. Capacitive touchscreens are the way to go and really make using them easy --these are regularly found in smartphones, tablets, and computers. You have to use your finger due to how it works with the electronic current and etc.

TL;DR - Resistive bad capacitive good

 

[Banz]

I remember a few years ago when touchscreen phones were first introduced there was a lot of craze for them but they were really quite rubbish. They've become better over the year. Now you can actually type without wanting to smash the phone into the ground.
What does suck is the gaming. You need buttons to play real games.

 

[Synerjee]

I like touchscreens. They're really useful when it comes to simple quick gestures and actions, thus saving time and increasing productivity to a certain extent. I have a few devices with such screens such as my iPhone, DS lite, iPad and iPod Touch and I find them very convenient. There are literally almost no kinds of devices around us now that aren't 'touchscreenalized', I should say.

Though I am in high support of touchscreens, I don't see the idea of touchscreen devices fully replacing keyboarded laptops as viable in the future. Having the solid and reassuring touch of a physical keyboard under my fingers beats having to type on an on-screen keyboard anytime. Also, seeing as devices with touchscreens tend to crack very easily as compared to non-touchscreen devices (except my extremely sturdy iPhone 3GS which has been dropped on the floor countless of times and has its screen still in one piece), I can foresee lots of money being spent to repair cracked screens, which isn't exactly what people have in mind.

 

[Tsutarja]

Capacitive touchscreens are the way to go and really make using them easy --these are regularly found in smartphones, tablets, and computers. You have to use your finger due to how it works with the electronic current and etc.

Heh, I was under the impression that capacitive touchscreens responded to pressure by heat, because I've seen cases where you could apply thermal paste to a leather glove, and the touchscreen would respond to your finger's movements with the glove on.

 

[Cordelia]

Heh, I was under the impression that capacitive touchscreens responded to pressure by heat, because I've seen cases where you could apply thermal paste to a leather glove, and the touchscreen would respond to your finger's movements with the glove on.

It allows the current to pass through. If you want a more detailed explanation, here you go.

A capacitive touchscreen panel consists of an insulator such as glass, coated with a transparent conductor such as indium tin oxide (ITO).[citation needed] As the human body is also an electrical conductor, touching the surface of the screen results in a distortion of the screen's electrostatic field, measurable as a change in capacitance. Different technologies may be used to determine the location of the touch. The location is then sent to the controller for processing.
Unlike a resistive touchscreen, one cannot use a capacitive touchscreen through most types of electrically insulating material, such as gloves. This disadvantage especially affects usability in consumer electronics, such as touch tablet PCs and capacitive smartphones in cold weather. It can be overcome with a special capacitive stylus, or a special-application glove with an embroidered patch of conductive thread passing through it and contacting the user's fingertip.
The largest capacitive display manufacturers continue to develop thinner and more accurate touchscreens, with touchscreens for mobile devices now being produced with 'in-cell' technology that eliminates a layer, such as Samsung's Super AMOLED screens, by building the capacitors inside the display itself. This type of touchscreen reduces the visible distance (within millimetres) between the user's finger and what the user is touching on the screen, creating a more direct contact with the content displayed and enabling taps and gestures to be even more responsive.
A simple parallel plate capacitor has two conductors separated by a dielectric layer. Most of the energy in this system is concentrated directly between the plates. Some of the energy spills over into the area outside the plates, and the electric field lines associated with this effect are called fringing fields. Part of the challenge of making a practical capacitive sensor is to design a set of printed circuit traces which direct fringing fields into an active sensing area accessible to a user. A parallel plate capacitor is not a good choice for such a sensor pattern. Placing a finger near fringing electric fields adds conductive surface area to the capacitive system. The additional charge storage capacity added by the finger is known as finger capacitance, CF. The capacitance of the sensor without a finger present is denoted as CP in this article, which stands for parasitic capacitance.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#Capacitive

 

[Hiatus]

I love touchscreen, because, well, they make devices easier to utilize... at least a little. We have about four or five devices in our house that have them, including my tablet, phones, and 3DS. I take very good care of them, because if something happened to their screens, they could become nonfunctional. :P

 

[Raine]

The only devices I own that are touchscreen are my Apple products, with the exception of my Macbook. Personally, I don't like the whole idea of touchscreen laptops though \: I've seen people use them and they are basically just larger versions of tablets, with a keyboard. Though, like several people have mentioned, having touchscreen makes utilizing things easier.

 

[Guest123_x1]

Currently, I don't have any touchscreen devices. I'm really not too keen of the idea of filling your screen with fingerprints just to manipulate objects on it. (Go ahead, call me old-fashioned just for saying this.)

 

[Juno]

My phone, Surface Pro and 3DS are touch screen. I had a Blackberry prior to my S4 and I'm still not very used to typing without buttons.

 

[Satoshi Ookami]

My 2 phones, tablet and Vita.
I would love to have touchscreen notebook sometimes. I love the touchscreen interface =D
It makes everything easier and more personal =D

 

[Judge Mandolore Shepard]

The only devices that I have that I have that have touch screens are my DS, my 3DS, and my iPod Touch. As for thoughts about touch screens in general, they are certainly the way of the future.

 

[Legendary Silke]

Touchscreens? Well, I'm getting pretty used to them and how direct they are, be it smartphone, tablet, or the 3DS I have right here. It probably will not be a long time before I end up with a touchscreen laptop myself!

Windows 8 didn't introduce support for touchscreen-enabled PCs - it merely popularized it in the standard PC space. Touchscreens are already prevalent by the time Windows 8 was released in smartphones and tablets. (Touch support was introduced in... wait for it... Windows 3.x. Tablet form-factor PCs even existed back then, but they are, of course, a completely different beast from today's sleek tablets.)

How good a touchscreen is depends on a lot of factors, really. Not all resistive touchscreen digitizers are the same, and the same also applies for capacitive touchscreen digitizers. It depends a lot on the actual hardware handling it. Resistive touchscreens that you may find in very cheap and/or old mobile devices tend to be not too responsive to anything but a stylus, but some of them handle non-stylus input surprisingly well. I'd reckon that I can probably get away with tapping with fingers on my Nintendo 3DS XL, for example, seeing as it's very responsive.

Touch input lag and accuracy also matters a lot when it comes to how nice a touchscreen is. You don't want the touchscreen to either not respond or respond to "phantom" touches, which tend to get in the way of your use of the device involved. ;)

 

[Burakki Tsuki]

I embrace touchscreens in most situations. I'm more of a desktop person being that I'm mostly a PC gamer, and don't see myself every using a touchscreen laptop or tablet. I would love to have a touch screen keyboard for my desktop and a mouse if possible. I have a silent mouse now as the click nice drives me crazy, especially when you click like a mad man in games like LoL and etc.

 

[Kikaito plush]

only touchscreen I can stand is the one on the DS family.
The reason is I can not stand the screen easily gets finger marks on it that you have to look through. I prefer an good old fashion keyboard/mouse any day to an touchscreen.

 

[Satoshi Ookami]

The reason is I can not stand the screen easily gets finger marks on it that you have to look through.

Well... you can always use stylus.

 

[Sheep]

Having a touchscreen on my laptop would be way confusing at first so I'm in no rush to get one of those but as far as phones and tablets (iPad) goes I love 'em. All the small gaming systems I use have touchscreens and I've also got an iPhone 5S and iPad 3 so.. I'm a touchscreen type of person, it seems.

Finger smudges are lame though, yeah. I make a habit to clean my tech every few weeks or more depending on how often they're used! The phone and 3DS have screen protectors though.

 

[AoTora]

The only device I have with touchscreen is my mobile phone ~ Experia. I love using it but at the same time I still prefer keyboard because I am used to write fast on it ~on touchscreen I often make mistakes while typing and I type much slower that way - the other disadvantage is that it gets scratched/broken kinda fast ~ Especially around me since I am really clumsy and my phone tends to fall out of my pocket a lot ~ so the screen is scratched and dirty so it gets kinda hard to read anything on my phone thanks to it.