Interesting talk yesterday with John Feland, technical marketing manager  at Synaptics, which makes touch pads and the interactive component of touch screens. They are based on a grid of interlocking diamond shapes, each acting like a tiny capacitor which charges up as your finger comes close.

They are scanned rather like an image sensor to build up a picture of what is happening across the whole surface – as opposed, say, to resistive sensors that track the x-y co-ordinates of a single finger. The advantage is that the Synaptic sensors can track more than one point, enabling some of the more exotic gestures that I reported yesterday.

Incidentally, one thing I did not report is that it may be possible to retrofit the new gestures on to some of the older Synaptic products but Feland was not promising anything.

He sounds quite confident that Apple will not be able to sue for patent infringement, claiming that the company has done nothing new except use ideas that have been around for years. Apple has been here before, of course, having “borrowed” the idea of the mouse-driven iconised graphical interface from Xerox Parc – and later trying to sue Microsoft for pinching Mac look-and-feel for Windows.

I have no idea whether Feland is right about patents on Apple’s latest interface. But Microsoft faces a similar issue over alternative office suites that look, superficially at least, like clones of its flagship products and I have yet to see any court cases over them. There are only so many ways you can lay out a screen, and if it is possible to claim ownership of one of them then you could start suing over the layout of a newpaper.

Similarly, if you could sue over gestures you could claim ownership of dance step or a nifty way to thwack a golf ball.

Here, a little later than promised, is Nokia’s latest N96 handset, successor to the popular N95.  As I reported Nokia has stayed roughly with its legacy though it does plan a touch-screen interface. I’m interested to see whether it will take its little N800 web pads any further, given the growing interest in these slightly larger formats.

They also use an ARM-cored processor, though I guess a lower powered version than the ones used in the Texas Instruments´s OMAP3440 platform which that company says has the legs to run a Linux-based general purpose platform. The N800 is essentially a thin client, with few onboard applications, and it would be a big step for Nokia to pack on more power.