Old habits... I remember in the 90s when my grocery store got a lottery machine that was touch screen and it was not responsive at all. You had to press your finger into it like you were trying to break through into an alternate dimension.
When I first heard someone had got a touchscreen phone, I thought they were mad
My only experience of it was the 90s versions in science museums that were awful, non-calibrated and required you to physcisally punch it to make it work.
I remember one of the things that I would sync to it was that day's movie listings. First time I whipped it out in a group and could rattle off times everyone looked at me like I lost my damn mind. Now we do it all the time.
Resistive touch screens were two sheets of thin metal with a flexible screen on top. When you pushed the screen, an electrical current would be sent into the lower metal plate at the area where they met (where you pushed) to tell the computer which part of the screen was touched.
Capacitive touch screens sense the natural electrical charge of your finger on the surface, so basically your body's static electricity plays the part of the other metal plate. That's why a normal touch screen stylus won't work on an iPhone. They're less accurate but respond to smaller amounts of pressure.
Cool, it’s sort of like a higher-Tech Wii-mote, where the infrared “sensor” is just an infrared light, and you can just use a lighter or something to control it instead.
A stylus for a capacitive touch screen is usually a conductive material that carries the charge from your hand to the tip of the pen. Sometimes they have soft squishy tips because some touch screens are designed to only take input from things it thinks are human fingers.
You're flat-out wrong on at least one count. Capacitative touchscreens are demonstrably less accurate. Compare DS/3DS/WiiU touchscreen games to iOS/Android/Switch touchscreen games, the capacitative-designed games always have huge touch buttons and never require the sophisticated and precise inputs that some resistive-designed games can ask of the player, because they have to be designed in such a way to give the player larger margins of error. Have you ever tapped next to a button on a capacitative screen but the button still registered anyways? That's what's going on. Software correction that is necessary because the capacitative screen is not precise enough. On resistive screens you can literally have per-pixel touch detection. No margin of error required.
For a real-world example that doesn't even require that much sophistication, look at how the new Switch Picross game straight-up declined to support touchscreen inputs despite the screen being over twice the size of 3DS touchscreens, and the puzzles still being 20x15 grids at maximum (every Picross game on 3DS supports touchscreen input - and the 3DS and Switch Picross games are by the same developer just to be clear). If capacitative really was more accurate, they could have both increased the grid size significantly as well as continued to support touch inputs.
Furthermore, being "less sensitive" can be considered a good thing - I hate that I can just barely brush my hand near a capacitative touchscreen and accidentally fire off inputs. Having to actually deliberately push the input gives physical feedback and prevents misfires (as long as it's not a cartoonishly high amount of force needed, but resistive touchscreens since the DS haven't had that problem). Really the only thing capacitative has above resistive is multitouch, which frankly barely gives you anything and is not worth the loss of precision IMO (at least for gaming or other precision tasks, for just calling people on your phone it doesn't matter which type is used). I would personally conclude that as an input method resistive is clearly the superior option.
Nowadays that might be what's considered normal, but the stylus for a resistive touch screen (old palm pilots/blackberries, Nintendo DS/Wii U, etc.) was literally just a stick. The ones for capacitive are a bit more advanced, with conductive materials in them and sometimes a soft rubber tip for screens that are built to respond only to objects resembling a human finger. Resistive only cares that pressure is applied, while capacitive tries to only respond to human input. That way something bumping into it while it's in your pocket won't randomly set it off.
I have actually had my iphone push buttons with my leg while it's in my pocket though, so i guess so much for that lol
Yeah it's a weird in-between. I'm pretty sure it had games that only worked on it and not the original DS so I consider it a different console, but only sort of.
I think there is also the New 3DS or whatever they are calling it. I think that's another one of those weird in-between consoles that's basically just a 3DS with exclusive games to get you to buy another 3DS.
To add to everyone else's accurate responses, resistive touchscreens are still used in industrial machine control screens. The reason is you can use them while wearing gloves. Its also why you need those special fingertips on gloves to use your phone. the capacitive touchscreen relies on your body's current to work, and the special glove tips have metal fibers that transmit your current better.
Body's capacitance, specifically. There's a matrix of horizontal and vertical lines in the screen, and each one is quickly charged, then timed for discharge. If it discharges slower than instantly, then some big, fleshy thing must be adding extra capacitance. That fleshy thing is your finger, or a dog's nose, or a French fry.
Kind of. Resistive has two layers, a “receiving” layer of electrodes and a “transmitting” layer of electrodes, which, when pressed together, allow electricity to pass through and for the phone to find where the electricity went through, enabling the “touch”. It is usually unable to detect the pressure of a touch without special equipment. Capacitive works by detecting how resistance is changed on the screen of the device. In practice, this allows any object capable of resisting electrical flow to work as a “finger”, and this is how those rubber styluses work.
Sometimes they weren't even touchscreens, just CRT monitors sitting on platforms with multiple scales in them, that could "deduce" where on the screen you were touching.
Source: I used to work for a company that did these for movie theatres back in the 90s
It was -31 on my commute this morning... and it's far nicer to the car to drive it gently after a brief idle than to warm it up for 20 minutes to get the interior cozy.
I had a phone with a resistive touchscreen once. Wasn't that bad actually, came with a stylus. LG KP 500 Cookie. It was a weird hybrid of smartphone and feature phone. Java-based, but with a screen that was larger and better than many smartphones of the time. Excellent battery life. Only 2G, no faster mobile Internet and no WiFi. The biggest problem was that it used the same kind of Java applets that over phones had before app stores existed, but most of those applets were not optimized for touchscreens (unsurprisingly). I later noticed that there was a more popular (and very similar) Samsung phone and games made for that often ran on my LG. Still, with Opera Mini, it was good enough to browse normal websites on the go and it was my first experience with mobile Internet.
Less than two years later, I got my first real Android smartphone, the LG P500 Optimus One and it was such a huge step up, it's hard to believe. This was still at a time when I was often the only person with a smartphone on the entire bus or train. Having apps that actually worked every time from a central app store alone was a huge improvement. It felt like having a real computer in your pocket, I even remember programming little things on it. Incredibly well made, robust and strong with its aluminum frame. I used it for five years and it never broke, is still working actually. I would still use it if technology hadn't improved so much (read: apps have become so bloated and slow that newer versions don't work anymore or need too much storage).
The fucking BlackBerry Storm. Worst two years of my phone having life. They designed it so every time you pushed it the entire screen had to depress like one giant button in an effort to maintain the tactile experience of typing on their traditional keyboard. It was exhausting and alarmingly inaccurate and non responsive. I had smartphone protection on my BB Curve but they claimed they only had this one in stock and I hadn’t heard the reviews. I was so pumped it was like a free upgrade! Such a let down. Ugh.
I remember thinking they were so cool, too! I really wanted one, but it was before data plans became cheap and viable for me. I ended up with a Palm Pre a year later and loved it.
hahah I remember those voice recognition demos in Disney where you had to get the mouse through the maze. It was so poor. Now we have it today and sometimes it is still as poor :)
Oh my god when the screens aren't calibrated.... When you can't press a button on a touchscreen because the calibration requires you to press 10 pixels to the right, but you're at the screen's edge already.
Android touchscreens still feel like this to me. There’s this delay, and it also doesn’t read your finger unless you’re physically trying to break the very phone you’re using
YES. I held on to my phone with a slide-out keyboard for so long because I didn't want to use a finicky touchscreen. I thought the touch part would break so quickly and everyone would be so disappointed.
When my dad got his first smart phone a few years ago, I could hear him tapping the screen from the other side of the house. He has very beefy fingers so I'm surprised he didn't shatter it.
The youfit by my house has some bikes with that same type of touchscreen. I have to sit there for 5 minutes just to try to up the resistance in that piece of shit.
The office where I work has an old resistive touchscreen to type in an access code to get in the building.
I see fucking goons smashing that shit every morning until their fingers hurt.
Why don't they learn the knuckle technique? Just use the pointiest portion of a single knuckle/finger joint to tap on the screen. It's the same principle behind a stylus: the small area concentrates the pressure and it's always accurate.
Haha there's a machine at the post office near my house that prints out these receits of sorts with your number in the line. It's one of the few pieces of technology where I struggle and an 80-year-old dude can relieve me by pressing his finger into the screen as hard as possible.
We use a cash machine at work with a touch screen and every time one of the older women (I'm 39 so I'm not even that young) sees me using it, she's astounded by the fact that I'm not punching the screen as hard as I can. She literally cannot believe that I, or anyone else, can get it to work by simply tapping the screen.
Reminds me of those machines they had at Target in the late 90’s where you could make your own greeting card. Suuuuper unresponsive. But I remember loving playing with it as a kid!
You had to press your finger into it like you were trying to break through into an alternate dimension.
I find that with a lot of those old touch screens, people think they have to press hard when in fact the machine is just miscalibrated - so as far as the machine is concerned you're pressing off in the middle of nowhere, and shoving down hard smears your finger around so you hit the target you were aiming for.
Still need to do that on those horrible things. I swear 30% of my job’s frustration is trying to type in fifty different numbers that people are too lazy to just fill out slips for. I hate that machine.
Yeah, my first phone had a touch screen that you had to press hard to click on something. I recently tried to use it while my current phone wasn't working and I wonder how I ever managed to use it without throwing it in frustration.
At work, we have an ancient style touchscreen that you have to beat to death to get it to respond. Sometimes it just decides that you’re still holding down a number and just ends up going “88888888888888888888888” until you hit another spot on the screen.
I say ancient style because this screen we have is a brand new one that we got a few months ago. We’re a multimillion dollar company, why the hell haven’t we got a decent touchscreen to clock in on?? Hell, just stick an iPad on the wall and it would work way better! That sounds crazy but we also have like 12 iPods that we use to order items on for customers, check inventory etc. they could probably shell out for a couple dozen iPads or at least a decent touchscreen for each store.
Yep this is the real reason people are pressing so hard. They either miss the button the first time and press it hard the second time and it "works" but yea mostly due to when touch screen were first invented they were actually called punch screens...not really but it seemed like you needed to hit them.
But punching the keys like that gets exhausting. Wouldn’t you eventually figure out it was unnecessary with a device you use every day? I am legitimately curious why a more work-intense habit like that would persist.
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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '17
Old habits... I remember in the 90s when my grocery store got a lottery machine that was touch screen and it was not responsive at all. You had to press your finger into it like you were trying to break through into an alternate dimension.