Touchscreen phones have been quite popular the past couple of months, especially with Apple launching their iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm capturing everyone’s attention. However, not all touchscreen phones are created the same. It is interesting to see who has the best touchscreen functionality, and we are going to discuss them in this article.
Resistive vs. Capacitive
HTC Touch Diamond with Resistive Touchscreen
Resistive screens are comprised of a number of layers. The top coat is usually a clear polyester film, which is flexible and smooth. When a finger — or a stylus — presses down, the top layer comes in contact with a lower glass layer, enabling voltage and electrical currents to be measured and the location of the press can be computed. Capacitive touchscreen, on the other hand, uses crystal-clear glass as the touch surface. They are not flexible, but they do have better endurance and feel. A circuit panel sensor underneath the glass records changes in electrical capacitance, or charge, when activated by a finger’s — and only finger — electrical charge.
Phones such as HTC Touch Diamond, Samsung Omnia, and many other PDA-phones use resistive touch screen. IPhone and Storm use capacitive touchscreen. If you compare the two kinds, you can clearly see the differences between the two of them by seeing phones features. Storm’s SurePress is definitely a breakthrough, allowing you to utilize double-action touch interface to the max. IPhone also benefits from the use of capacitive touchscreen because they can introduce the famous pinch motion (using two fingers to control the interface and zoom level). Still, capacitive touchscreen main disadvantage is the fact that you must use your finger to control the device. You can’t even use gloves, because the interface relies on your body’s capability to pass electrical currents. This is why resistive touchscreen is still widely used, especially in the Asian countries where they need to use styluses to be able to hand-write characters.
So which one of the two touch screens is the best? For the time being, we will have to give the crown to capacitive touchscreen for their features. A capacitive stylus is being developed as well, so it wouldn’t be long before you can use stylus on your iPhone.
Ankur Jain is a Software Engineer in Test Automation. After a 5 years stint with Accenture and Oracle, he started his eLearning company. A long-time blogger and proud owner of the "Learn" series of websites. 