Touchscreens, if you’ll pardon the bad pun, are a very touchy subject. On the one hand, people love the capacitive screen of devices like the Apple iPhone. That’s because they offer a smooth multi-touch finger-friendly experience. On the other hand, there is still value in the resistive touchscreen, because they’re less expensive and can handle more precise inputs from a stylus.

Research in Motion didn’t exactly have the most impressive of launches for the first BlackBerry Storm. Many people, myself included, were not at all happy with the SurePress “clicking” touchscreen. RIM wants to fix this and they’ve got the patent to prove it.

According to this recently filed patent, it looks like the BlackBerry maker is creating a wholly new kind of touchscreen that combines the soft multi-touch feel of a capacitive touchscreen with the relative accuracy of the resistive screen. To combine the technologies, RIM is simply layering one screen on top of the other.

This is just a patent application at this point, so we’ll have to wait and see if RIM can get it approved. If this goes according to plan, we could be getting a dramatically improved experience on an upcoming BlackBerry Storm 3. Resistive and capacitive, together at last?

Source: UnwiredView