Sharp Debuts Laptop With Optical-sensor LCD Pad

From PC World: Sharp will soon put on sale in Japan a first-of-its-kind laptop that replaces the traditional trackpad with an LCD panel with an embedded optical sensor.

The 4-inch LCD panel packs optical sensors between the screen's pixels so it can both display an image and sense fingers or pens placed on its surface. The use of optical sensors instead of a touchscreen overlay on the small screen means it retains its brightness -- and multiple fingers can be sensed simultaneously. Most touchscreens can manage just one or two fingers at once but the small screen in the new laptop can sense up to four.

In its most basic mode the small screen acts as a conventional mouse trackpad, but hit an on-screen button and the small screen displays a menu with shortcuts to features like Web bookmarks, dictionaries, e-books, photos and games.

Tap the bookmarks icon, for example and a list of your favorite Web bookmarks comes up. Choose one and the browser launches in the main window with that chosen Web site. That's a neat enough feature but the technology really starts to come into its own with more complex pen input.

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