touchscreen

Whenever people complain to manufacturers about skimping on screen size, the stock answer is usually, "Well, we wanted to make the camera small and light, but we needed to leave room for the buttons."

That's not an excuse that needs to be used with the HP R937.

HP has made room for a bigger screen on the back by eliminating most of the buttons. The R937's large 3.6-inch display, as on some of the Sony Cyber-shot compact cameras, doubles as a touch screen from which you can navigate menus and manipulate photos after they have … Read more

Prada's phone is as close to the iPhone as you'll get. Everything is done with a tap of your finger. There are essentially no buttons to work with.

Once you get beyond how this looks, though, you'll face up to a major cell phone decision: do you really--I mean REALLY--like this feature? In my case, it's starting to feel like a "no." There's something to the tactile feel of a standard cell. Even with a flat panel (think Razr), you still get a feel for the numbers you're dialing. Not so here. … Read more

A PC with a twisty screen you can write on almost always=cool, and Thursday Gateway will release its latest take on the concept with the E-155C Thin & Light Convertible Notebook.

This one is aimed at students. The E-155C looks like a notebook, but works like a tablet PC with digital pen and touchscreen capability, with a screen that swivels 180 degrees in both directions. It has a 12-inch wide screen, Core 2 Duo processor, biometric fingerprint reader for security, and an alarm and flashing LED light should someone try to break in. All of this weighs in at … Read more

Toshio Iwai, the designer of beloved Nintendo DS music game Electroplankton, has been showing a prototype of his jaw-dropping Tenori-On instrument since 2005. Last week, Yamaha announced plans to turn this Star Trek-worthy digital sound toy into an actual shipping product, retailing with an estimated price tag of around $1,000. For most consumers, that is an insane price for a beautiful sound toy, but electronic musicians and artists are falling all over themselves for this thing. The Tenori-On is a touch screen grid of white LEDs that allows you to compose music by activating little squares that trigger built-in … Read more

Cowon may be a bit of an underdog in the U.S. market in terms of sales, but boy, this company sure does know how to make a quality MP3 player. I have in my hand the Cowon D2, a solid device dominated by a 2.5-inch screen. I had seen a picture of the player before CES, but it didn't do the D2 justice--the player has such a nice feel to it. The sleek, black body is wrapped in a brushed-metal border, where you can find some tactile controls: a power/hold slider, volume buttons, and a menu … Read more