The Samsung Galaxy S features a capacitive touchscreen that is compatible with multitouch, which means that it can sense more than one point of contact at a time. How does the Samsung Galaxy S use this neat tech? Read on to find out.
Web surfing skills
During web browsing is when multitouch takes on its most popular, and arguably best, function. It allows for the pinch-to-zoom gesture, where you move two fingers together on the screen to zoom out, and apart to zoom in. It was made massively popular by the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S does it even better, because the Galaxy S’s huge 4-inch screen is one of the best screens ever seen on a mobile phone.
It has faster response times than a standard screen, uses the latest Super AMOLED display technology and can detect a massive 16 different points of contact at any one time. Other capacitive touchscreens struggle to keep track with two points of contact.
Pinch-to-zoom, when combined with standard drag navigation, lets you surf web pages without ever pressing a button. Other non capacitive touchscreen phones will rely on zoom in/out buttons or a double tap zoom gesture. These alternatives work just fine, but they lack the organic feel of the Samsung Galaxy S’s fluid zooming.
Pinch-to-zoom lets you be far more specific about the level of zoom you’re after, while the 1GHz processor of the Samsung Galaxy S handles text re-scaling on-the-fly with ease. As fast as your may fingers go, the Samsung Galaxy S can go that bit faster.
An eyeful of your own content
A similar zooming gesture is used throughout the phone’s interface. You can zoom-in on photos with it in the gallery, which is perfect for checking whether a close-up snap of something is really in focus. You can also use it in the messaging app, to easily enlarge the font of messages.
We’d hope you can already ready SMS messages on the Samsung Galaxy S‘s 4-inch display yourself, but zooming comes in handy if you’re trying to show someone else a text without handing them your precious handset.
Fun times are ahead
Multitouch only became a bundled feature of Android phones following an update to Android 2.1, which arrived on the scene earlier this year. As app developers have had to consider that most Android phones won’t have multitouch capabilities, most apps haven’t used this function.
As more, and cheaper, handsets are using Android 2.1 and multitouch, it’ll start to feature more regularly in apps. Whether it’s a multitouch touchscreen piano or a map app, multitouch is only going to become more and more important in the Samsung Galaxy S’s future.
Check out the Samsung Galaxy S in action…
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