For full-touch mobile use, capacitive touchscreens are the best solution we've got -- and it has absolutely nothing to do with the iPhone, it has to do with the incremental improvement in usability brought about by near-100 percent touch registration. That's a big deal, because even a 5 percent loss of registration on an on-screen QWERTY keyboard would represent roughly one letter missed every five words (assuming an average word length in the English language of just over 5 letters). Resistive screens have many, many totally valid applications, but put simply, phones aren't one of them; they've been outmoded by a different technology that's more appropriate for the size and use that the average handset sees. Registration issues aside, fingers are larger than styli, and when a resistive display is registering an unweighted pinpoint coordinate, you end up ironically losing accuracy -- a benefit touted by resistive that's really only realized if you're using a stylus full-time. No one's claiming that capacitive screens are the magic elixir to make human digits achieve superhuman accuracy on a tiny screen, but... you know, step one is making sure the phone knows you pressed something.

Anyhow, HTC's now claiming that the just-announced Tattoo has gone resistive because its 2.8-inch screen is simply too small "to be accurate with" as a capacitive. The company's tweet goes on to say that resistive "ends up registering fewer miss-clicks," which could be argued -- maybe -- were users expected to use styli. Android is not and was never designed as a stylus-driven platform, and unless HTC's driving in that dubious direction, the claim is bunk. More realistically, the resistive display is probably a cost sacrifice the company made to keep sticker shock to a minimum, which is fair enough -- HTC's trying to cover many market segments with Android, as it should -- but we wish they'd been upfront about it.

If the Storm 2 seriously uses newfangled piezoelectrics to provide localized tactile response on its display -- something the original Storm lacked with just a single clicky button mounted underneath the screen's center point -- then how come we're coming to find out we've got four buttons mounted near the corners this time around? At this point, this picture posted of the Storm 2's sensitive innards probably raises more questions than it answers -- we're clearly looking at four buttons here, which as CrackBerry says would facilitate the "multi-press" necessary to engage key modifiers like Alt just as you would on a regular keyboard. The problem is that this doesn't even being to explain how or why the screen hardens up like a rock when the phone is off, because the four buttons plus traditional capacitive touch sensitivity would realistically get the job done without alien technology. We're looking forward to a thorough briefing from RIM once the phone gains some official recognition, but until then, let the theories fly.

[Thanks, Doughy]

Combining huge screens with usable keyboards in a pocketable package is the challenge phone manufacturers are eternally doomed to try to solve, leading to an endless stream of (mostly comical) patent applications for ridiculous form factors that will never see the light of day. That's where we think -- well, we hope -- Nokia's latest app comes into play, combining a portrait-oriented QWERTY keyboard with a wide display that somehow swivels behind the body of the phone when you only need a little bit of screen real estate. Looks cool on paper, but realistically, we think this thing would be the most unwieldy Frankenstein of a handset since the MPx were it ever to be produced. Tilt-slide on the N97 looks fine, guys. Seriously.

[Via Cellpassion]

Here's one you may not have heard before: a manufacturer decides to stick a VGA touchscreen in some handset model not because it wants VGA resolution, but just because it got a killer deal on them. That's the rumor being floated on a handful of sites and forums about ASUS' monster P750 Windows Mobile 6 Professional device, with some sharp-eyed contributors noticing that each logical pixel on their devices' screens are actually comprised of -- count 'em -- four physical pixels. Indeed, a quick glance of the spec sheet for the alleged part number used reveals a "VGA/QVGA dual viewing mode," so the story seems to check out, and folks are apparently already hard at work enabling full 640 x 480 resolution on their beloved devices. Good luck, everyone!

It's hard enough for some of us to go a few months without losing a one-piece cellphone, but imagine the hilarity that'll ensue if Sony Ericsson makes good on a recent patent application to break 'em into multiple pieces? The basic idea is to make the phone's body independent of the display itself, and while the app doesn't do a particularly stellar job of explaining why this is valuable, we gather from the drawings and diagrams that you'd flip the screen between front and back depending on whether you're using the phone in the open or closed position. The pivoting clamshell design in devices like Samsung's FlipShot seems a lot more robust to us, but then again, probably 75 percent of these patent apps never become actual products, so we won't worry about it too much just yet.

[Via Unwired View]

Some clever geeks souls at the University of Washington have used some pretty serious tech to allow themselves to make a flexible and safe -- don't they always tell us that? -- contact lens with a built-in circuit and lights. Uses for it are all right out of a James Bond film, seeing a caller-id pop up as if floating in mid air, web browsing, and of course its application could extend to cars, gaming, and just about anything you can dream up that uses a display. No word on what type of communication gear they could use, but hopefully security will be top notch as having somebody hack your eyes as you're out and about would be a pain.

Just in case a GSM handset with a relatively sleek exterior, integrated GPS chip and a very sexy selection of color options weren't enough to pique your interest, how's about we throw in a 2.4-inch 3D display? Truth be told, we're just as in the dark as you when it comes to deciphering exactly what "3D display" means in this scenario, but we're hoping that it has more to do with 3D maps and less with gaudy goggles. Regardless, the candybar-styled handset boasts tri-band GSM connectivity, up to 2.5-hours of talk time (200-hours in standby), an embedded GPS antenna, QVGA panel, USB connectivity, a 1.3-megapixel camera, integrated media player, miniSD expansion slot and a couple of built-in games to keep you busy. Regrettably, AMEX Digital wasn't kind enough to dish out pricing or availability deets, but it looks like you can phone 'em up if one of the mobiles pictured above just climbed to the top of your must-have-at-all-costs list.

We're loving this table-top crystal-esque ball, slap a SIM card in, fire off an SMS and the giant 85 LED display writes the message out in the GPRS iBall for all to see. Oh, but the fun doesn't stop there, the device also has 64MB of storage and can be mounted on the ceiling if need be. Of course, there are always downsides to fun tech and this one has a doozy: the gadget will cost you $2,200 with 100 free messages, and after that prepare to shell out $230 per 1000 messages. While we get that new tech can be pricey, we don't understand why a simple incoming SMS can cost so much that it would be more affordable to hire an assistant to follow you about.

[Via textually.org]

AU Optronics seems to know a thing or two about LCDs, and the engineering minds behind the scenes have apparently developed a few mobile screens that replace those wide borders with more pixels. The firm will be showing off its new 2.2-inch transflective panel with the "world's slimmest border of 0.9-millimeters" and its 2.7-inch panel which touts the "world's highest contrast ratio" (for its size, we presume) of 2,100:1, which just barely edges Sharp's iteration. The near-borderless display is reportedly "a half size smaller" than existing renditions, and the 2.7-incher claims to be uber-bright and offer up an unusually wide viewing angle as well. Unfortunately, it sounds like this technology won't be making its way up the LCD food chain, as one researcher noted that what you see here will be "mobile device-exclusive."

[Via FarEastGizmos]

There are monstrous projectors, run-of-the-mill renditions, small versions, and then there's ridiculously tiny ones, but we've got love for 'em all. It looks like Microvision tends to favor the diminutive kind, however, as the company is looking to showcase its "ultrathin, miniature full-color projection display" at next week's CES. Hoping to cram this bad boy into your next mobile phone, PDA, or other handheld gizmo, the firm is touting its incredibly small form factor as the next coming of mobile displays. Taking up the same amount of space as Apple's 2G Shuffle, the display can project "extremely sharp and vivid" imagery onto walls, bodies, screens, or skyscrapers, with a maximum image size "similar to a big screen plasma TV." Sure, we're fully aware of the sensationalism they're tossing in, but this type of development could refine mobile video and the ability to view it on a decent sized screen, so hopefully we'll catch a glimpse of this miniscule PJ in just a few days.

[Via Uber-Review]

Heck, plain ol' QVGA displays on phones are still a fairly scarce commodity in some parts of the world, but Hitachi knows you want... nay, need more. VGA, perhaps? Nope, keep going; think wider. Hitachi has officially started pumping out copies of its 2.9-inch, 800 x 480 cellphone display, promising web browsing experiences that could finally catch up with the 3G data speeds modern handsets are offering. The company points out that such crazy-fresh resolution typically leads to crazy-fresh battery drainage thanks to increased backlight brightness requirements, but engineers have apparently put in some late nights miniaturizing the circuitry and designing a new pixel structure to minimize power draw. Better yet, the panel promises a 170 degree viewing angle and a 400:1 contrast ratio. Only thing left, it seems, is for some scrappy manufacturer and/or carrier to step forward and announce a killer device wrapped around this sucker. Why do we get the strange feeling we should keep our eyes on NTT DoCoMo for that?

We've never really understood these displays on Bluetooth headsets. They might come in handy if you had a pocket mirror on you, but would it not then make sense for the text on the display to be backwards? At any rate, Helium Digital's new HD-880 uses the OLED display for help screens in addition to the standard-issue caller ID information, useful for folks unfamiliar with the pairing process. The Bluetooth 1.2 headset offers a claimed four hours of talk time and 30 hours of standby for a suggested retail of $90.

[Via SlashGear]

Some modern phones seem to have enough trouble with battery life as it is without throwing a glorious 16:9 display into the mix. Be that as it may, Sony's hard at work on exactly that, and we admittedly can't help but revel in the thought of dropping one of these suckers into a Sony Ericsson handset somewhere down the line. The screen is apparently only a part of their "RealityMAX" graphics subsystem that'll presumably handle all your MPEG and 3D acceleration needs, and at just under 3 inches long with a 432 x 240 resolution and 262K color depth, we've no doubt that watching a movie (or at least some manner of broadcast television) would be a very rewarding experience indeed.

Making mobile displays extraordinarily bright seems counter to the logic that battery life is priority number one, but Konica Minolta is taking its chances and marketing its new organic EL backlight tech to cellphone manufacturers, claiming to rock 1,000 candela per square meter (by comparison, a highway flare burns at about 70 candela). We're questioning the need -- or ability, for that matter -- to look at a screen blasting more light at us than a small flashlight, but if the output can be toned down for typical use, we can certainly see the safety applications in this. Just don't kill our precious batteries, Konica Minolta, and we're down.

[Via Akihabara News]