touchscreens

Sony can now add a feather to their cap; their new e-reader, the Touch Edition (PRS-600), does something Amazon’s Kindle can’t. The Touch’s 6-inch screen can capture handwritten notes, which are exportable and saveable.

If you never thought that soda machines would adapt to the high-tech world, think again. Coca-Cola's Freestyle fountain comes equipped with a touchscreen that is able to mix flavors on the spot, using precise machinery originally developed for dialysis and cancer treatments.

There are over 100 flavors available, across an array of drink brands, including Coke, Fanta, energy drinks, flavored waters, and more. When you select a drink, you're able to select from a variety of flavors, some of which are unfamiliar (Raspberry Coke?! Peach Fanta?!).

It seems increasingly rare to see a new gadget these days without a touchscreen. However, touchscreens' versatility is both the technology's biggest strength and its weakness. We've lost the tactile memory we associate with our television remote controls or old cell phones, where we knew and could feel exactly where the buttons we needed were without bothering to look. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are trying to combine the benefits of both, by adding a latex overlay on top of a touchscreen that inflates to create a tactile surface.