14 DAY TRIAL // With most of the previous touch sensitive patent from Apple taking shape in the form of the iPhone, one would have thought that would be the end of it. Apple however, is still thinking of new things and taking steps in new directions, as shown by the latest patent filing.
Everyone was expecting the new iPods to be like the iPhone only without the phone part. While that might still very well be the case, the controls of such a device could be very different from what anyone was imagining. In the newest iPod patent, Apple takes the touch screen and breaks it into two separate pieces, leaving the screen as just a screen, and placing the touch sensitive surface on the back of the device. This non 'coplanar' approach gives you the best of both worlds, since you don't need to touch the screen of the device and can keep it clean for proper viewing, but still have a large touch area and fingers on the back, of which at least one should be conveniently free for input.
The key to this approach will be force sensitivity. The touching finger would control a cursor on the display and pushing harder would register as a click. The patent covers not just the typical controls on an iPod, such as music and video navigation, but also phone controls and more. Of course, the devil is in the details, as always, since just holding the device could mean touching the touch sensitive areas, but so far Apple has shown very resourceful in coming up with solutions to such problems.
While many may get very excited over this patent, and it does seem like a very plausible direction for the new Apple portable devices to take, the company has been known to patent things that never see the light of day.