3mobile device 10 finger touch screen

Mobile screen manufacturer Synaptics (the guys who do the iPhone and Palm Pre screens) announced a new line of capacitive sensor touch screens that can have 10, yes 10 fingers simultaneously recognized on the screen.  The product is their Clearpad 3000 series, no word on when/if this will be used in mobile devices any time soon.

This is where I know I am just not a visionary – I can see this a something that is neat and probably even valuable to some, but I just don’t have a real sense of why you would need this except for gaming.  Now I love my iPhone games (Wild West Pinball rules) but they suck the life out of the already quick to drain iPhone battery, so to me, gaming is limited.  Synaptics says the new screens are designed for low power use, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Popular Mechanics points out an interesting use for the multi touch points – the ability to detect differences in touch pressure.  In theory if you press harder, your finger spreads out.  Since the touch points are designed to be smaller, you should be able to tell if lots of points are pressed close to each other – a hard press – vs a smaller number of discrete points.  Synaptics isn’t saying they can do this, but it would be nice.  I see lots of uses for this in gaming, but also in regular apps – pressing harder in a drawing app gives you darker or thicker lines as a simple example.

Innovation is good, and it is a bit of a if you build it they will come advance.  I’m sure there are really clever developers already thinking of ways to incorporate more than two fingers into their applications.