BIG ROD @ Dec 17th 2008 6:52PM

I don't know why everybody is making such a fuss over capacitive vs resistive touchscreen technology; each technology has its pluses and minuses is heavenly dependent upon the operating system's GUI icons.

I think capacitive technology serves Apple and the iPhone very well because the iPhone's GUI was built form the ground up with large enough icons for finger touch tapping (as opposed to finger nail tapping or stylus tapping).

Then you have the Windows Mobile operating system and other operating systems which are more suited to resistive technology because of the smaller icons that are used, and therefore needing the use of your finger nail or stylus for more precision tapping. That's just the nature of the beast because legacy operating systems like Windows Mobile and Blackberry, for example were designed to be used with styluses, trackball and click wheel buttons. It's just that touchscreen technology is all the rave right now and companies are scurrying to make touchscreen technology work with these existing operating systems. I don't see devices that use Windows Mobile, Blackberry or other OS using capacitive technology because it simply isn't practical unless there is a tremendous undertaking of re-engineering the GUI from the ground up with larger icons like the iPhone. And even then, as long as drop-down menus are still a big part of some operating systems, we'll still need resistive technology to select those small drop-down options unless those are made to be bigger as well. I think the human experience is just so used to physical buttons and tactile feedback, but there is something to be said of humans evolving to the next level and maybe a total touchscreen experience without buttons is one of those things in the future. I personally prefer a combination of touch screen and physical keyboarding to type on devices such as the Sony Xperia X1.

I think for now both capacitive and resistive technologies can co-exist and one is not better than the other.