I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The best rumors are developer rumors…they’re almost always true. Host Optical, a Taiwanese electronics company, claims it has developed new “capacitance” touch screens that are more waterproof, less sensitive to humidity, and do not have a significant “aging affect,” which is what makes an iPhone-like touchscreen become less sensitive over time. These screens are unlikely to be in the iPhone being released on Monday at WWDC, but they could definitely make a showing in future generations of iPhones, as well as iPods that inherited their bigger brother’s multi-touch abilities.
The two screens pictured above are 3.2 inches and 2.8 inches, respectively, and are smaller than the current iPhone’s 3.5 inch touchscreen. iLounge, who first broke the story, speculates how Apple would downsize the interface to a smaller screen (as typing on a QWERTY keyboard might be made more difficult), but I suspect that could be solved by displaying the keyboard in the horizontal position, as with the current Safari browser.
It is unclear what this development really means. Electronista posits that the screens could have nothing to do with Apple at all, as this would generally rub their typical shroud of secrecy the wrong way. These prototypes may in fact be designed for use in an iPhone knock-off, which would be consistent with the marketplace in Asia. Even so, this higher quality screen makes me think Apple might be involved because I can’t quite see an iPhone clone having better quality components than the original.
[Via iLounge]
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