Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Synaptics Onyx: Number one cell phone company Nokia coming out with a handset design based on a all touch screen concept will surely give the idea a boost, Synaptics was the first company to do so a few weeks a go. It developed its all touch screen phone concept with industrial design company Pilotfish. Onyx uses Synaptics' ClearPad, an optically clear display solution for creating a fully adaptive user interface. The ClearPad input system eliminates the traditional mechanical keys, just like Aeon, found on phones today and adapts to present the information and controls a user needs at any given moment. More intelligent than conventional touch screens, Synaptics says ClearPad accurately recognizes not only points and taps, but also shapes, complex gestures, and proximity to the user's finger or cheek. The company asserts this creates new possibilities such as assigning functions to two-finger taps, closing tasks by swiping an "X" over them, sending messages by swiping

New Touch Screen cell phone from Sony Erricson could be your next phone...

Now that cameras and MP3 players come as standard for the majority of new models, cell-phone manufacturers are looking for the next big (and shiny) thing to entice users to upgrade -- and touch-screen technologies may be the answer. Nokia's has posted some images of a new concept phone, called Aeon, that does away with nearly everything that you're likely to expect to find in a traditional mobile handset, such as keypad. Instead, as with a prototype cell phone called Onyx from Synaptics, Aeon is all touch screen. From the sleek and colorful (obviously touched-up) concept pictures, it appears virtual keys come up on Aeon when you need to make a call. One thing to keep in mind with this concept device (and Onyx for that matter): It is hard enough to keep a smartphone's display clean today, what's it going to be like when the be all and end all of a mobile handset is its screen.