Next-Gen iPhone Displays May Support Touch with Gloves On
Today's projection-type capacitive touch-panels are becoming increasingly popular with their adoption in devices like Apple's iPhone. Compared to resistive films, however, projection-type designs have been limited in terms of the range of objects that they could sense.
Context & Ripple Effects
This filing continues a run of Apple display-and-input patents that Patently Apple has been tracking: January's new touch screen technology for iPhone and MacBook Tablet, mid-2009 speculation over haptics, fingerprint ID and RFID readers in future iPhones, and back in 2007 Engadget's look at Sharp's next-gen multi-touch LCD for the then-unreleased hardware cycle.
What's new here is narrower but practical: the filing targets the known weakness of projection-capacitive panels — the design the iPhone helped make dominant over resistive film — which senses bare conductive objects only. The glove claim itself is unconfirmed patent speculation rather than product news.
First-order effects
- If the technique ships, iPhone users in cold climates gain winter usability without doffing gloves — removing the main everyday penalty of capacitive over resistive screens.
Second-order effects
- The workaround economy built around capacitive limits — conductive-thread gloves and capacitive styluses — loses its rationale for iPhone owners, pressuring accessory makers to differentiate elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- Panel suppliers such as Sharp, already named in earlier iPhone display reporting, would face pressure to bake richer object-sensing into the panel itself rather than treat touch as a fixed commodity layer — making input capability a component-level differentiator.
The trend: Touch input is moving from simple finger-position sensing toward discriminating among objects and conditions, with Apple patenting each incremental capability as it goes.