Remember when everything had a capacitive touchscreen, and we decided we really hated those and we wanted resistive ones that required styluses? Me neither. That’s why I’m a little puzzled as to why the Eee Keyboard, which had a perfectly workable capacitive touchscreen when I gave it its first hands-on in January, has been changed to have a resistive screen and integrated stylus. It’s like they produced a concept car, and then when they put it into production, they gave it wooden wheels.
Watch the full video demo above, and see the madness that is the new design decision. Controlling a cursor on screen by using a stylus on a differently-shaped touchscreen… seems a bit of a terrible idea to me.
[Via Netbook News]
Agreed. Horrible decision. It’s just one fail after another lately. Delay, delay, design change… ugh.
I’m not going to use a stupid stylus. I’m going to use my finger. So it better work just fine if I use my finger.
Considering the small screen on this one, I would definitely call resistive an upgrade, given that such a small screen is required to display a totally non-finger-friendly operating system such as windows. Sure you can have some top layer skin, but at some point or the other, you would have to dive deeper in the operating system, and that’s where capacitive becomes useless.
Oh and yes! What might seem usable in a brief hands on might not be as usable in everyday life.
Capacitive isn’t the best solution for everything, just because it’s all new and multi-touchy. Resistive + stylus is far more accurate for finer operations on the screen.
Multi-touch resistive screens have also been developed. There was a demo video floating around a year or so ago, and if you didn’t know otherwise you’d think you were watching a capacitive screen being used. I don’t know if they’ve found their way into any products yet.
The stylus isn’t dead. The combination of multi-touch and stylus accuracy is the future.
Styli always get lost. If it can’t be done with finger touch, then the design needs to be re-thought
You should be able to operate a resistive touchscreen with just about anything. Stylus, fingernails, empty markers…
If they did it to start it wouldnt have made a difference, but changing it right be fore its actual release is going to make a big difference whos actually going to buy it.