HTC working on a stylus for capacitive screens?

Greg Kumparak

Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More

Friday, August 14th, 2009

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Meat digits. Sausage fingers. Call them what you will, but some people’s hands are just a bit larger than others. “Finger friendly” for one person doesn’t necessarily mean “finger friendly” for another. As of late, the trend in handsets has been toward capacitive touchscreens, which is bad news for the big-boned; while the screens provide improved accuracy over their resistive alternatives, they don’t play nicely with styluses that many still cling to. HTC, one of the few big names still throwing a lot of weight behind resistive screens, might be looking to solve that.

According to a recently uncovered patent from last year, HTC’s got something in their labs for those who want the accuracy of a capacitive screen without having to ditch their plastic pointer. By adding a lightly magnetic nub to the end of the stylus, there’s just enough current floating around for a capacitive screen to detect.

That’s great news, but we still hate styluses with the most fiery of passions. Please, HTC: make this available for the folks who need it, but lets move away from stylus-oriented UIs.

[Via WMPowerUser]

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