touch-screen

Smule's Magic Piano for iPhone brings the fun and beginner-friendly piano app to the small screen. Already a popular music-app pick on the iPad, Magic Piano offers up a unique touch-screen music experience, letting you play both classical and pop music hits by following and touching beams of light on the screen. If you don't like following along in Song Book mode, you also have the option to play freestyle in Solo mode, which lets you configure the keyboard into interesting shapes (circular, spiral, and other layouts) to add to the fun as you play.

Part of what … Read more

Aside from rumors of the BlackBerry Monaco/Monza and Curve Touch, we've heard that RIM is also adding a couple of regular Curves to the mix just in time for BlackBerry World. They're code-named Apollo and Sedona, and supposedly are for GSM and CDMA, respectively.

To make things a bit more interesting, this leaked photo on Boy Genius Report is apparently a picture of the BlackBerry Orlando, which is just like the regular Curve except it has a touch screen (unlike the Curve Touch, this phone has both a touch screen and a physical keyboard).

This is strictly rumor territory, of course, and it makes us a tad suspicious that the handset's code name happens to be the same as the name of the venue for BlackBerry World next month. Still, this might be good news to BlackBerry fans as it would provide the best of both worlds.… Read more

It's about time gyms started playing catch-up with our gadgets. No more should patrons have to argue over which episode of "Glee" to watch or which Beyonce album to blast. (Shoot, if it were up to me I'd run my heart out to the Sex Pistols while watching "Doctor Who," the combination of which would surely empty most gyms.)

A platform released as a separate add-on screen by Netpulse in 2010 may just help those of us who don't know what we want figure out how to get it. (OK, I'll stop … Read more

One day, you might be able to turn your watch into a tablet--by stretching it.

At the CeBit tech fair in Hannover, Germany, Asus is showing off IRIS (Inspirational Research for Immersive Space), its vaporware concept for the next generation of personal computing devices.

IRIS can be whatever you want it to be, such as an alarm clock, watch, cell phone, e-reader, tablet, or gaming device. You simply slide the edge of the flexible display outward or inward. My favorite thing about this futuristic adaptive device, aside from its incredible style, is that it aims to eliminate the need to carry multiple gadgets. As smartphones, tablets, and other devices evolve, it seems more obvious that they will eventually converge while somehow maintaining portability. Zach Morris would so have this in "Saved by the Bell: 2040." … Read more

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled updates to its all-in-one desktop PCs for consumers and businesses.

Dubbed the HP TouchSmart 610 Consumer PC and the HP TouchSmart 9300 Elite Business PC, the computers feature a 23-inch 1080p HD display and multitouch technology. However, touching or tapping a screen that's upright can be awkward. So, the screen features a recline that can dip to a 60-degree angle.

The upcoming PCs are the latest entrants into HP's touch-screen computer lines. The company already sells a 600 series and 310 series for consumers and a 9100 series for business customers. HP also sells the … Read more

In the competition between native applications for mobile phones vs. Web applications, hardware support often makes native apps an obvious choice for programmers. But the World Wide Web Consortium is tackling one area, touch-screen support, in an effort that could help Web apps catch up.

The W3C published an editor's draft of a new touch-screen standard for Web apps today. The draft specification is designed also for devices such as drawing tablets that don't have a screen, but today's hot market for smartphones makes touch screens the more important focus.

A standard--if designed well and adopted--would make … Read more

One of the best parts about Panasonic's higher-end touch-screen ultracompacts is that they feature brighter than usual lenses. In the case of the FX78, you get an f2.5-5.9 24mm-equivalent wide-angle lens with a 5x zoom. That's not as nice as the f2.2 on its predecessor the FX75, but it's still good.

Its other key specs include a 3.5-inch touch-screen LCD and a 12-megapixel high-speed CCD sensor. The sensor is a new design and it's paired with Panasonic's Venus Engine FHD processor. This combo allows for high-speed burst shooting--full resolution at 3.… Read more

Every manufacturer should really have a touch-screen pocket camera in its 2011 lineup and Kodak's is the EasyShare Touch. It's a 14-megapixel ultracompact with a 3-inch touch screen and a 28mm-equivalent wide-angle lens with a 5x optical zoom.

Beyond those basic specs you get 720p HD video capture with a one-touch record button, so no fumbling with switching modes; HDMI output; automatic photo organization that sorts by people, date, keywords, and videos; artistic effects for photos and videos; and, of course, Kodak's Share button for quickly tagging your shots to be sent off to e-mail addresses or … Read more

A couple months ago a tech demo called Epic Citadel hit the App Store showing off Epic Games' Unreal III graphics engine on an iOS device. There wasn't much action to Epic Citadel besides walking and looking around at an intricate castle landscape, but the graphics were nothing short of jaw-dropping for the iOS. Epic promised that games were coming soon using the esteemed graphics engine, and iOS gamers everywhere waited to see what Epic could come up with that would work on a touch-screen device.

Infinity Blade, Epic's first game for the iOS, is finally here and … Read more