Amazon Getting Touchy about the Kindle

Now you know Amazon's serious about Kindle competing with the iPad, besides having a less cringe-inducing name.

The New York Times is reporting that Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York-based start-up specializing in touch-screen technology, a move they see as a shot across Apple's (News - Alert) iPad bow.


“Amazon will merge Touchco’s technology and staff into its Kindle hardware division, Lab126, which is based in Cupertino. Touchco, which began as a project at New York University’s Media Research Lab, had roughly six employees and had not yet turned its technology into a commercial product,” the Times reported.

Terms of the deal were unreported. Nobody from Apple or Touchco are commenting on anything.

According to the Times, Touchco uses interpolating force-sensitive resistance, which at about $10 a square foot is much less expensive than the capacitive touch screens used in the iPad and iPhone (News - Alert) are considerably more expensive: “Unlike those screens, the Touchco screens can also detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points.”

Game on, iPad. Since you're basically a sleeker Kindle anyway let's see how you do in the ring.

Touchco “had designed its technology to work well with full-color LCD screens, similar to those used in the iPad and Hewlett-Packard’s (News - Alert) coming line of tablet PCs,” the Times wrote, adding “the technology could allow Amazon to introduce a full-color touch-screen Kindle.”

It's an exciting field to be in now: Earlier this week industry observer Priya Ganapati reported on Displax, a Portugal-based company, which has a product they say can turn any surface into a touch-sensitive display. 

The “thinner-than-paper polymer film can be stuck on glass, plastic or wood to turn it into an interactive input device,” Ganapati said. It's about the thickness of human hair, 100 microns.

Industry observe Spencer Dalziel said while “the technology was initially conceived for commercial environments the company doesn't want to miss any tricks for potential applications and claims that it will be a boon for LCD manufacturers.”

“It is extremely powerful, precise and versatile,” she quotes Miguel Fonseca, chief business officer at Displax as saying. “You can use our film with on top of anything including E Ink, OLED and LCD displays.”

Donald Norman, a Northwestern University professor and an expert on design and engineering, told the Times that while the E Ink technology currently used by Kindle works for long books, “it is too slow and ponderous” for reference works, multimedia and any tablet device that seeks to connect to a wide range of entertainment: “He said that to respond to the iPad, Amazon could either drop the price of the current Kindle or 'compete and switch to some other type of display'.”