Use Your ‘Resistive Type’ Touchscreen Right ! at 7:42 PM

In today’s mobile market touch screens are used in phones, notebook PC and PDAs. The thing is there are various types of touch screens with their own pros & cons. One thing to keep in mind is those different types of screens acts differently and wants to be ‘touched’ differently.

Lets get a basic idea about their technology in brief:

Capacitive type: As the name implies they use the change of capacity to identify touched point on screen. These are used mainly in mobile phones and equipments such as iPhone, iPod touch etc. Usually have a good responsiveness to touch. Problem of using capacity is only some things such as human skin changes capacity of those screens when touched. In short, they are only sensitive to human skin and like elements. You cannot use thing like plastic pen (stylus) on that. And they’re also lacks precision point identification compared to others.

Resistive type: This uses the change of resistance of multilayered thin films on top of screen to identify touch point. This is commonly used in mobile phones and PDAs. This is sensitive to any thing that touches the screen and can be used with greater precision pointing. That adds the ability to use stylus and hence hand writing recognition as well. Problem of this is, screen has to be touched with more pressure than a capacitive type (READ this ahead, before pressing your finger into your display and breaking! ;) this article is about how to use it better.)

There are many other types, like Infrared, Acoustic pulse, Strain gauge…. But we’ll talk more about resistive type.

Resistive type is mostly used on phones & PDAs because of its ability to add handwriting recognition to the device. Nokia has also used resistive type screens to their mobile line up started from 5800 XpressMusic. But as some people are more used to Apple’s iPhone/iPod type screens, it may seems different to use. They may even complain its not sensitive as their iPod. (well for a certain extent it is a tiny bit low in sensitivity, but that’s not the end of the world.)

Main thing is you have to accept this is a different type of screen, so have to use differently if you want to get maximum out of it. If you use it correctly, you will see it has much more to offer than a capacitive screen.

Touch is more precise in resistive type, so it like to be touched with a point type object rather than a bold finger. So I think you can use nail if you don’t like using a stylus all the time. Thing is its better to use a screen guard (protector transparent film) if you use the nail or other object than your supplied stylus. Because most other objects will scratch your screen.

With Resistive type, pressure is the key, as “pressure = force/area”, using a pointy device with less area can apply good pressure without much force on the screen.

Because resistive touch screens are much more precise, you can have fun with handwriting recognition and precise point selecting. Multi touching and kinetic scrolling is also at developing level. Some people misinterpret ‘Kinetic scrolling’ as a feature of capacitive screens, but it is not. Its fluidity of scrolling is given virtually by OS, you can try that on apps like Opera mini 5, even with a resistive type screen.
So when next time iPod user says “your Nokia touch screen is not good as my apple, just show him how to use it correctly and just ask him whether he got handwriting recognition on his” ;)