but capaitive screens are still in progress.
for example samsung claims that the galaxy s2 will have "glove support" because of the display response time of 0.01 ms but no review or hands on was talking about that so i'm not sure.
we will see

Yeah, so I got my new Android phone today. And let me tell you, I hate the capacitive screen for not being resistive. How anyone can prefer this, is beyond me. It's like a screen that will only work if you grease it with finger fat. I want my stylus back, darn it...

At least the glove season is almost over.

That's one of the biggest fails of capacative, although to be fair I don't really have a lot of hate for it and there are lots of advantages to either type of touchscreen.

I am sure there are some to these beyond the look-I-can-pinch-to-be-cool gesture, but I haven't found them yet. Because I've used resistive up to now, I am used to the accuracy of the edge of a finger nail. Using my finger on my new Blade is nowhere near accurate. I hope this is just a question of technique, but NOT using the nail edge feels contra-intuitive to me at this spacetime.

I am getting an anti-glare screen "guard", though, hopefully that will make the fingerprint impact a bit less annoying.

I like very much the resistive screen.

There are not enough applications that take advantage of it
(e.g., painting, dynamic music, 3D-modelling, 3D-desktop, ... )

Apple uses well the few advantages of a capacitive screen.
Everything could easily be emulated by a resistive screen. But the software is missing.


The software frameworks don't support very well the advantages of resistive screens. E.g. I am missing an easy manner to handle the touch pressure with Lazarus.

there are good and bad capacitive touchscreens, just as there are resistive screens

I am using a desire Z and to be honest I found I had to make a real effort to not accidentally touch it, even when holding it my fingers could wrap round and touch the edge of the screen. The GUI designers need to be very good at choosing the size and spacing of on-screen buttons; on the wife's ZTE Blade with its smaller screen you have to be very accurate and it takes some practise!

capacitive screens' touch regions are an invisible pattern, and I think they tend to be much larger than resistive. this test is quite interesting:
http://modmyi.com/forums/iphone-news...racy-test.html

The n900's is definitely one of the best resistive ever, and I would prefer it, especially in winter! Many's the time my hands have become too cold to operate the android phone when there's a high wind-chill.

I blame the gadget sites for promoting capacitive screens, when they should have been more balanced and rated the screens on performance; sometimes I think it was abused as a pro-apple anti-nokia excuse. Nokia held out but no-one would listen to reason, especially the blind sheep that are consumers.

I agree. There are (i) good and bad capacitive screens (ii) good and bad resistive screens (ii) good and bad UI programming.

Personally I much prefer the very good N900 resistive screen to the very good iPhone-4 capacitive screen.

However, one thing that does separate them is the support for multi-touch UI. Although not critical for all applications today, there are some that need it, or at least are much better for having it. Also, I suspect that multi-touch will become more important in future applications.

I used both an iPod Touch and N900 for a while, and I can say that I prefer, by a LOT, how the N900 works. It's so precise and i can use my nails to hit stuff.

What is dynamic music and how does it take advantage of resistive screen?

Except maemo

One, important factor, or let's say THE most important factor for n900 to choose a resistive screen, is the accuracy.

n900 uses predominantly the same software that runs on your PC, which are written for mouse usage, and therefore, require pixel-perfect accuracy.
If n900 had a capacitive screen, all software would need rewritten UIs, and most games wouldn't work unless they were rewritten entirely.
The whole point of the n900 was to use existing software, not create another symbian.

I still believe that the future of mobile phones lies in running the exact same software as on PCs, not variants of it.
So, currently, that implies a resistive screen.
Unless everyone suddenly decides to rewrite their X11 software to support mouse *and* a tiny resolution mode (possibly with multitouch)

Not to mention multitouch is a very difficult nut to crack, since most mouse algorithms rely on the fact that the cursor can only be in one place at any time. Making software multitouch aware will surely degrade performance for people only using a single cursor.
It's also likely that people will start pushing different UI widgets into separate threads.