Press your lips to your cellphone, send your lover a kiss

Touch screen developer Synaptics and industrial design house Pilotfish have teamed up to demonstrate a new touch-sensitive cellphone user interface able to recognise pointing, tapping, complex gestures and proximity to the user's cheek.This, they say "creates new possibilities such as assigning functions to two-finger taps, closing tasks by swiping an 'X' over them, sending messages by swiping them off the screen, or answering a phone by holding it up to your cheek."They suggest that their 'concept device', dubbed Onyx, will enable cellphone manufacturers to "visualise a fundamentally new form of user interface for mobile phones."For example, a phone using the technology could, they say, recognise rough shapes and be capable of sending "an emoticon style kiss message" in which the recipient would see an image of the sender's lips kissing the phone!The key to Onyx is Synaptics' ClearPad, an optically clear, capacitive touch screen 0.5 m thick that would be overlaid above the display screen of the phone. This would completely replace mechanical input keys and, the developers claim, be "more intelligent than conventional touch screens." According to Clark Foy, vice president of Synaptics, "The Onyx phone is a breakthrough illustration of how advances in interface technology and collaborative design will drive the future of mobile interactions and services."