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Engadget: It’s no good plunking your precious iPhone into a little dock that tries to skitter away from you. You need something with mass. Something with presence. Something like the AuraSound Sound Station, which offers an “audiophile-class acoustic design” in something a little less… dirigible-esque than other high-end docks we’ve seen. It also sports a seven-inch touchscreen wedged in the middle there, enabling “unrivaled ease of use,” also letting you play videos and things. AirPlay support appears to be missing, but the device is said to be upgradeable to make it a “living, learning machine” that can grow with you. That and many, many more idealistic euphemisms are waiting for you in the press release embedded below — but no mention of price.

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CNet: Touchscreens that track two fingers will soon seem basic. At least, that is, if you compare them with the multitouch-sensor ClearPad 3000 Series, recently announced by California-based Synaptics.

The transparent sensor tracks up to 10 simultaneous finger touches, making possible complex multi-finger gestures, such as closing an application by ‘crumpling’ it with several fingers, or playing polyphonic sounds on a virtual piano keyboard.

Apple made multitouch popular with its iPhone, which debuted about four months after Synaptics introduced its currently shipping two-finger sensor, ClearPad 2000, in August 2006.

Although it’s widely speculated that Apple is using Synaptics’ technology, it hasn’t been confirmed. One phone that does use the sensor is the T-Mobile G1, made by HTC. Samsung and LG are also confirmed customers.

The new sensor features an accuracy of plus/minus 1mm, is 0.3mm thick and is available in sizes of up to 203mm (8 inches) diagonally.

That supported screen size, and the speculated relationship between Synaptics and Apple, makes us wonder if this sensor is what Apple’s been waiting for in order to launch its much-rumoured tablet. Synaptics is also introducing a more basic model, the ClearPad 1000 Series, that supports single-finger gestures, such as tapping, pressing and flicking.

These sensors are available in sizes of up to 109mm (4.3 inches) diagonally. The company says manufacturers already have the sensors in hand, and consumers can expect products containing them by the end of the year. The sensors use capacitive technology, usually considered to be more sensitive than resistive sensors. Capacitive sensors cannot be used with a stylus or a glove though, as opposed to resistive sensors.

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CNet: Touchscreen handsets may be the talk of the town, but they’re useless to the visually impaired. Software developed by Jussi Rantala and his colleagues at the University of Tampere in Finland attempts to address that by bringing Braille to touch-enabled mobile devices.

The team installed the software on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet with a piezoelectric layer that ‘displays’ a raised dot on the touchscreen with a single intense vibration and the absence of a dot with a longer and weaker pulse.

Two methods of presenting Braille were devised by the team. The first requires users to swipe their fingers across the screen to read each of the six dots in the 2×3 matrix in Braille. The second method generates a sequence of six dots, each 360 milliseconds apart, when the user taps and holds on a character.

Volunteers who tested the software were more comfortable with this option, although it took some getting used to.

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Gizmodo: Here’s one from left field: you know how your car’s navigation console locks itself when in motion, whether or not there’s a passenger to safely operate it? Apple, of all people, wants to fix that.

In a patent filing recently published and dug up by Apple Insider, Apple lays out various methods, including weight, proximity and biometric sensors, for detecting a passenger in the front seat, and then allowing he or she to operate the nav while the car is in motion.

It goes even further, though, by specifying means for the system to identify exactly who is touching it via biometric sensors, and then grant them access or not depending on pre-set safety settings.

So if you don’t want your 16 year old kid using the nav at all while in motion, just thumbprint him and program your Apple GPS.

Wait, what, Apple GPS? While apple has patented numerous techniques for pairing gadgets to cars, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one that was so specifically geared toward an in-car device. Innnnteresting.

Although this could obviously describe a way for a turn-by-turn iPhone 3.0 app to behave in-car. So like all patent filings, which are written in a language so obscure as to make reading and parsing by anyone who is not a patent lawyer, take this with some skepticism. But as a concept, sounds kind of interesting—is the real iDrive coming?

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Guardian: Nokia says it has unveiled “the world’s most advanced mobile computer, which will transform the way people connect to the Internet and to each other.”

The N97 has a 640 x 360 pixel 3.5 inch touch screen and a slide-out qwerty keyboard. As expected, it runs Symbian S60, and is Ovi- and N-Gage-compatible.

The N97′s key innovation is the introduction of So-Lo. Nokia says: “The Nokia N97 introduces the concept of ‘social location’. With integrated A-GPS sensors and an electronic compass, the Nokia N97 mobile computer intuitively understands where it is”.

The N97 will be released next year with 32GB of memory at an estimated €550.

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Telegraph.co.uk: When Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry, decided to make a touchscreen version of its popular mobile email device, it was taking a huge gamble.

Text input is the BlackBerry’s bread and butter – the reason it’s proved such a hit with businessmen is because it allows them to type emails quickly and easily on the go using the miniature Qwerty keyboard. 

The BlackBerry Storm is manufacturer Research in Motion’s first touchscreen phone. But it’s one that has paid off in spades – the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motion’s first attempt at a touchscreen device, is a triumph. It’s a really powerful device with plenty of clever features, but let’s set that to one side for the moment and focus on the question people really want to know the answer to: what’s it like to type on?

A revelation, is the short answer. RIM has managed to develop a touch-screen keyboard that’s as close to typing on real buttons as you’re currently likely to get.

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Gizmodo: Nokia has stayed away from the touchscreen market with its mainstream mobile phones so far, preferring to leave this particular area to rivals like LG and HTC.

Like a lion studying a herd of grazing antelope it appears to be finally ready to pounce, and is planning not one but a range of touchscreen devices across the market.

According to Kai Öistämö, head of devices for Nokia, it’ll be releasing a complete portfolio of touchscreen products to both and high and low end of the market.

The first of these sounds like it will be the Tube phone, will be aimed at the mid-range market and will be announced in few months.

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Electronista: Creative may finally be launching into touchscreen media players with its rumored ZEN Share player, say tips from alleged insiders. While the name is no longer certain, the device is claimed to be the first to rely on touch navigation. The new player would also break ground as the first Creative player to sport the company’s X-Fi sound processing hardware, which helps restore missing detail from the compressed music files most likely to be used on a portable device.

The Wi-Fi sharing feature said to be at the heart of the new ZEN may also be different than expected, according to the claim. Rather than simply following the practice set by Microsoft’s Zune, which limits sharing to local users and limited tracks, the feature is said to be “revolutionary” and unlike anything seen so far. No word has been received as to whether sharing or any additional features will rely on Internet access.

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ExtremeTech: Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones, announced on Monday it has licensed new touch feedback technology from haptic developer, Immersion.

Under the new long-term license, Nokia will have the right to use Immersion’s VibeTonz Mobile Player technology in any of its mobile devices sold worldwide. Immersion said it will begin supplying the VibeTonz software developer’s kit (SDK) to Nokia’s developer community starting this month. In turn, that community will be able to create downloadable applications and future content for VibeTonz-enabled cell phones.

According to Immersion, who also makes tactile-feedback technology for game controllers and other devices, the system can provide tactile cues for mobile touch screen interfaces, as well as be used for mobile games with touch feedback.

The technology is currently used in more than 4 million LG and Samsung phones worldwide, Immersion said, and the addition of Nokia brings the number of cell phone makers to three.

With Apple’s iPhone leading a new wave of touch-sensitive phones, Nokia’s CTO, Tero Ojanpera, recently told Reuters that “optical sensors and touch will be the next big things.”

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SlashGear: Despite seemingly making most of the rebadged smartphones available around the world, HTC has still found time to stir up some rumours with a new teaser campaign.

Apparently they’re planning to “herald a new mobile experience that will change the way we use and control our phones” at an exclusive event in London on June 5th, and they’ve released a photo of someone touching the number 5 to drop a heavy-handed hint at some sort of touchscreen.

My guess is some sort of capacitive touchscreen, similar to the iPhone or the LG Prada, since HTC haven’t currently got a handset using the technology.

It’ll likely have multi-touch, and maybe some sort of speech interface since that’s a perennially popular one with designers.

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