Ok, try picking up your phone and trying out the movement on the back of the phone that this would require. It doesn't work. If the majority of the phone is touch sensitive how are you supposed to hold it? It makes for really awkward movement of your hand and let's say you figured out how to get the scrolling down, you still have A HUGE issue of UI. The iOS experience nor its apps were made for any kind of cursor or mouse interface.<p>If you need to reach across the screen without taking up screen real estate, use your other hand. Or use a stylus. Problem solved.<p>Edit: Also not to mention that for the most part iOS does a pretty good job of letting me be pretty accurate with my bulky fingers. It's not perfect, but it's certainly not terrible.
Sony has already released a gaming console with this feature, the PS Vita. <a href="http://www.modojo.com/features/playstation_vitas_rear_touch_pad_putting_it_to_great_use" rel="nofollow">http://www.modojo.com/features/playstation_vitas_rear_touch_...</a>
"LucidTouch: A See-Through Mobile Device" by
Daniel Wigdor, Clifton Forlines, Patrick Baudisch, John Barnwell, Chia Shen. Published at UIST 2007.<p>paper: <a href="http://www.cliftonforlines.com/papers/2007_wigdor_lucidtouch.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cliftonforlines.com/papers/2007_wigdor_lucidtouch...</a><p>video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMQ7urAvuc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbMQ7urAvuc</a>
The Notion Ink tablet originally had this back in 2010. It was disabled and eventually removed entirely. There were rumors that it was squashed by an apple patient, but I cannot find anything more substantial.<p>The whole NI tablet debacle made me quite jaded towards miracle tech. I'm lucky it predated kickstarter, because I would have most likely backed it up to 50% over retail. It's probably why I don't own a 1st gen pebble.<p>Here is a good overview of the concept's rise and fall: <a href="http://www.engadget.com/tag/NotionInk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/tag/NotionInk/</a>
as others have mentioned it's not a new idea. i think the reason you don't see it in Apple products at least is because it is a step backwards in terms of metaphor. the iPhone's core metaphor is direct manipulation. this requires that your brain visually connects the motion of your finger with the objects on screen. if you manipulated things via the back touchpad, this illusion would be broken and it would feel more like interfacing with a traditional computer and less like direct manipulation.
How about instead of a 1:1 touchpad on the back, which could have problems, Put a trackpad on the back of the phone, but have it just be a small square. So it wouldn't be a "full-fledged" touchscreen, but a small touch sensistive section. You could also have a discrete capacitance detecting sliver on the side of the phone so that it's only active if you're physically holding the phone. Clicks would happen using a button.
Apple, Google, and others have patented concepts around this. No clue whether they're working on them...<p><a href="http://www.slashgear.com/google-patents-rear-touch-controls-6-years-after-apple-09273179/" rel="nofollow">http://www.slashgear.com/google-patents-rear-touch-controls-...</a><p><a href="http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070103454%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070103454&RS=DN/20070103454" rel="nofollow">http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...</a>
I suspect that Apple, Samsung, etc. have thought of this, so why aren't they doing it? (After all, the PS Vita has had a back touchpad for a while.) The first thing that comes to mind is that people hold their phones with the back. Accidental clicks would be very difficult to avoid. In contrast, the PS Vita is larger, held with both hands and has non-touchpad areas of the back where you can grip it, as I understand.<p>I'd still like to see someone try it.
Sony put this into the Playstation Vita and it's awful. Few games use it, and it's clumsy in the games that do. It's possible that a company like Apple could make it good somehow, through sheer will and hardware/software expertise, but I suspect it's just not a good idea in practice even if it's good on paper.<p>Based on my limited experience, some potential issues:<p>Not having the user's fingers obscuring the view of the screen may in fact increase the perceived latency, since they're focused on the screen and don't have the motion of their fingers to distract them.<p>The latency issue would be twice as bad if you want to render a 'ghost' of your hands on the screen as described in this design concept.<p>Interacting with onscreen elements is <i>more</i> difficult when using your hands on the rear of a device, even with a 1-1 mapping. I don't really know why this is, but even with a cursor onscreen, I have found it to be true.<p>Accidental interaction is 5 times worse with a rear touch panel. Apps on the Vita that use it extensively are a huge pain in terms of accidental swipes and touches, especially if you try to lay the device down on a surface for a moment, or set it on your knee to use the front touch panel.<p>The core problem with virtual buttons/joysticks/gamepads is that you have no physical feedback about where your fingers are, and as a result you lose your 'centering' and your inputs end up being misinterpreted or not landing. Moving your fingers to the rear of the device makes this worse, because you can no longer look at your fingers to figure out where they are.
I don't know anything about how well this works or how well it was made:<p>DOOGEE DG800 : sub $120 smartphone with dual touch : <a href="http://www.pandawill.com/doogee-valencia-dg800-smartphone-creative-back-touch-android-44-mtk6582-45-inch-otg-p89140.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pandawill.com/doogee-valencia-dg800-smartphone-cr...</a>
The first thing that came to mind was the Nokia Gem concept from around 2011:<p><a href="http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/11/10/nokia-gem-what-sort-of-phone-do-you-want-today/" rel="nofollow">http://conversations.nokia.com/2011/11/10/nokia-gem-what-sor...</a><p>The whole thing was a touch screen.<p>Here's an Engadget article on the Nokia concept with a fair amount of comments:<p><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/11/nokia-gem-concept-dazzles-with-excessive-customization-options/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/11/nokia-gem-concept-dazzles...</a>
Sensus (<a href="http://sensusxp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sensusxp.com/</a>) is working on something similar as an external case for the iPhone. Dislaimer: I have a dev kit.
> "The biggest problems is that your fingers are not transparent. They obscure the screen."<p>I've <i>never</i> realized this was even a problem, much less the biggest one.
The Motorola Charm had a trackpad on the back of the phone. I know it could be used for scrolling, not sure if it worked in the same capacity as the dual-touch design concept.
<a href="http://www.oneprice.in/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Motorola-Charm-MB502-1-Optimized.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.oneprice.in/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Motorola-C...</a>
The Motorola Backflip (<a href="http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_backflip-3079.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_backflip-3079.php</a>) actually had a touch pad in the back that could be used in the same way trackballs were used on Blackberries. It was pretty awful to use, though that might have been because it ran Android 1.6
Makes more sense to use the front camera as an eye tracking device. Then you get a screen without obstruction. Maybe Apple is already on it:<p><a href="http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/10/apple-files-eye-tracking-system-with-advanced-gaze-controls.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/10/apple-fi...</a>
I think the future of smartphones are foldable either in the middle like a foldable sheet of paper or expandable flexible oled displays formed like Chinese hand fans or origami.<p>Further more the cell phone of the future will be able
to borrow any big screen in its vicinity. Something like NFC from the large display/computer monitor and built in AppleTV, Google Chrome MiraCast functionality. You will also be able to borrow local keyboards for better input, but without the bluetooth hassles of setting it up. So the cafe, workplaces of the future will have wireless chargers and screens that you can borrow for your mobile device.<p>So you will carry your device around but borrow larger displays and keyboards. The device will be powerful enough todo your everyday computing. No need to drag a big laptop around if you do not want to.<p>These devices will also be user serviceable like Google/Motorola Project Ara. It is simply not good for the environment to throw away a whole phone just because the display, battery is bad or because you want to upgrade the radio components. So in the future devices will be made to be recyclable, this trend will be driven by the scarcity of rare earth metals. It will simply not be good enough to buy and throw devices and not think about the recycling of rare metals and the environment.<p>The future is bright.
... "The samples will be missing lots of implicit information such as how to install the necessary libraries and how to deal with missing dependencies and version conflicts." ..<p>Even people who grasp code pretty well loading up some code(stable library) needed by tutorial might get tripped up by a wrong advice such as library that was fixed for some security vulnerability that broke a number of thing that current examples need to work and failing code just misbehaves in a number of ways, one remarkable - blaming general implementation of examples that they are trying breaking security standards and not give any alternative to do otherwise. that is unless you find a reference somewhere on some obscure blog that says that you have to load specific version pre-alpha/HEAD^3 because HEAD is broken so many subtle ways that it will cause you even more pain. This happened not once and not only to me I bet. I know I could've patched my code but with the deadline and fact that I don't know much about cryptography that would not be a sane option.
That's a good idea and all, but you know what would be better than two touch panels? A button to turn them off!<p>With screens bigger than your hands and accidental touch detection being as bad as ever, a simple button to turn off the digitizer would make a lot of people happy...
This seems particularly useful for very small touch screens, assuming you can comfortably hold the device without miss-clicks.<p>Perhaps a smart watch could even have its screen on one side of your wrist, and a "touchpad" on the other.
The oppo n1 has a small rear touch pad.<p><a href="http://en.oppo.com/products/n1/" rel="nofollow">http://en.oppo.com/products/n1/</a>
for scrolling maybe<p>for gaming, most likely uncomfortable
users are used to using thumbs to play rather than using their index fingers<p>i rather be waiting for those kind of panel-less screen