tactile on technabob...

As much as I dig my iPhone and HP Touchsmart touchscreens, there’s something that I still miss about actually feeling buttons under my fingertips. And while I’ve gotten pretty good at typing without even looking at the screen anymore, I’ll never achieve the kind of touch typing speed I’ve hit on a traditional keyboard. So I was really intrigued when…

I sit at a computer much of the day and always thought I was a pretty fast typer. But apparently, those pesky painted letters on my key caps are actually slowing me down. Thankfully, there’s a new keyboard that gets rid of the tiny bit of extra drag that those characters put on my tapping fingertips.

The Das Ultimate Keyboard…

Instead of using a traditional 2-dimensional display surface, Shade Pixel renders information using a deformable skin surface which provides a 3-dimensional texture to its output.

Developed by researchers at the Design Media Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the device uses a dot-matrix array of solenoids attached to a flexible Spandex skin. When sent the…

Do you love the iPhone, but struggle with the smooth on-screen keyboard? Personally, I’ve found it pretty easy to use, but the touchscreen definitely doesn’t offer the touch-typing feedback that you get with physical keys. This new, low cost screen overlay for the iPhone claims to provide tactile cues to your fingertips to help them find their way.

My Touch…

One of the biggest problems with touchscreen interfaces is the lack of any sort of tactile feedback. In response to this concern, Samsung has released a touchscreen phone with Immersion’s VibeTonz haptic feedback system.

The Samsung SCH-W559 phone provides users with a vibration that approximates the sensation of a key click when they interact with the phone’s touchscreen. The QVGA…