multi-touch in X

[Christopher Heiny]

On Thursday 12 July 2007, ground control picked up the following 
transmission from Bryce Leo:
> I can't find anything about clearpad on Synaptics website, do you
> have a link to it? Or is it not availalble yet? If it is available
> perhaps it may be a possible gta02 inclusion? I mean, out the gates
> with multitouch, that would be pretty cool, also a more durable
> touchscreen is always a biig bonus for guys like me who really put
> the beating on phones.


ClearPad is in LG KE850/Prada phone (most prominent product ClearPad) 
and Onyx demo phone (shiniest object with ClearPad).

Onyx info is here: http://www.synaptics.com/onyx/ but be aware that Onyx 
itself is a "concept phone" intended to showcase ClearPad.  Onyx is not 
a real product.

You're right, basic ClearPad info is amazingly sparse on the Synaptics 
site.  I'll dig for some more.  But essentially it is a transparent 
capacitive touch sensor.  It can track a single finger to resolution on 
the order of 40 to 80 dots per mm (depending on a number of factors), 
which is more than you need for a GUI.  Optionally, you can order it 
with a "pinch" feature, where the distance (as a proportion of the 
screen size) to a second finger is reported.  


As to getting it into GTA02, you'd have to lean on Sean and FIC.


DISCLAIMER: I work for Synaptics.  Naturally, I think we make the best 
touch sensor in the solar system, and also quite naturally I want to 
sell everybody a lot of them (preferably at huge margins).  However, I 
also think OpenMoko is enormously cool, and want to participate without 
even an appearance of conflict of interest.  For this reason, I've 
tried to keep my yap shut in all the multi-touch discussions.