Getac, maker of those rugged laptops and tablets that can take more of a battering than bog-standard notebooks have come out with a new touch screen they say they will integrate into their future devices starting with the Getac V100 tablet PC.
What is so special about the new touch screen technology is that you can use it while wearing gloves – being able to edit documents, rotate images, zoom in and out of maps and manuals and navigate the system. Just what you’ll need when you’re working out on the road.
The screen has a 2048 x 2028 resolution, 100 points per second report rate and less than 35ms response time, so should be fast enough.
What Getac has done is base the touch-screen on a rare resistive or pressure-based, multi-touch technology that will be perfect for those who need their devices in extreme weather conditions, while working with chemicals or while operating heavy machinery.
With this technology, heavy duty gloves just won’t get in the way, not like with most other touch-screens out there, which work by sensing fine electrical signals from bare skin (capacitance technology) and not by pressure.
Capacitance technology won’t work if you’re wearing gloves, which is highly inconvenient for those who work in environments where both a computer and gloves are a bit of a necessity.
“Our customers work in some of the most extreme environments and weather conditions where touch-screen technology, and flick gestures are faster, safer and more convenient than using a keypad,” Getac President Jim Rimay said.
It just isn’t practical to whip off your gloves whenever you need to use your computer. It can be cumbersome, time consuming and just impractical.
Getac’s new range of rugged tablets are the first commercially available machines with screens to have solved this problem.
Of course it doesn’t mean you have to wear gloves to use them, as it is pressure-based.
The new screens should be available by the end of this month and will be fully compatible with Windows 7.
The new technology doesn’t come cheap either, as you might expect, so for that reason Getac are aiming it more at the defense and the field market than for Joe Public himself.
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Resistive touch screens are neither rare nor new. I would say the vast majority of GPS devices use resistive touch, and probably also a majority of portable touch screen devices in general. Palm phones and PDAs have used resistive touch for years–that’s why you can use non-conductive styluses with them. If anything the popularity of capacitive touch in portable devices is a relatively recent phenomenon, largely thanks to the iPhone. Resistive touch is also generally cheaper, so it’s not like Getac is jumping through hoops to give its customers glove-friendly touch.