THIS. There is a wide field of knowledge and study involving juror selection. Lawyers from all sides get to ask questions of the jury and get some number of exclusions by default. Samsung should have found the techies and patent holders in the jury pool and used their exclusions to kick them out. But they didn't; someone messed up.

(disclaimer: IANAL)

Are you kidding me? Do you think the average (even above-average) user wants to go through PAGES and PAGES of radio buttons? Rounded vs. sharp corners? Why not allow them to determine just HOW round? Now we've gone from radio buttons to sliders everywhere.

Seriously, customize EVERYTHING? You can do that in Linux - look at how well that worked out for the consumer.

The only thing that comes close to an eInk eReader that can handle PDFs well is the Kindle DX ($380). Do not go with a smaller format reader and think you can convert PDF articles to ePub. It turns out really badly - unreadable.

Back when eReaders were the big new thing, many companies were going to come out with a large format reader. PlasticLogic was going to come out with their Que reader, but it was delayed multiple times and cost something like $600. It was dealt a quick and merciful death.

The only sensible options today are the Kindle DX or a tablet. I read plenty of journal articles on my Honeycomb tablet, and it's really not that bad. Certainly not bad enough for me to drop $400 on a dedicated paper-reading device.

The problem is the material dictates much of the design. For FTIR to function, the curvature of the clear material must be such that the angle of refraction causes the light inside it to bounce back from the surface internally instead of escaping, like a superball in a narrow hallway. This means you need both a material with a high refractive index (i.e. Poly Methyl MethAcrylate aka Lucite/Plexiglas) and a shape that propigates the light beam. This then will dicate the overall design of the mouse.

Which means features such as handedness ergonomics will be difficult to do with this design. All the existing designs on the market would need to be modified to accomodate it. The process and materials involved in attaching the lightpipe to the base may not be easy or cheap. The shape they use at least in this demo will have issues with the front wanting to drag from the low area of contact with the desk relative to the pressure. And since it's a brittle material, I'm betting that thin arch with nothing supporting it will crack from stress as it ages, rendering the mouse useless in a much shorter time than users fine satisfactory.

Buy an acrylic cup from the supermarket and use it. See how long it takes it to develop the first cracks. Now assume any crack over 1mm will cause a diffraction of the light beam rendering the whole thing useless. I'm betting an optimistic 6 month product life is not ideal for a mouse.

Oh and the fad for "green" everything will hate it, since PMMA takes twice its weight in petroleum to produce.

Ok, I did. The FTIR seems to have this issue, so does the side mouse. The orb clearly DOES NOT, as you can see from the sensor image that his fingers are on it most of the time. The cap mouse is tricky to tell due to the video length and quality but if you look at 2:24 it seems like his fingers are on it while moving the pointer to the window before clicking to drag, just like a regular mouse. Arty also does not have this issue.

Now, please go and actually use a touchpad. They work like I've described. The hovering finger problem can be solved in drivers by coding for differential activation. Which behavior do you think will be in a final product, the one that's in a lab prototype that causes discomfort, or the one that's been an established industry standard for a decade?

I just realized something. If the "orb" mouse becomes common, it's going to need a tactile indicator for hand alignment. Like the little raised bumps keyboards usually have on the home keys so you can find the default position by feel.

If it doesn't get named the boob mouse after that, I'll eat one.

Not true. Put your finger on a touchpad and hold it there. Does the mouse move continuously? Does it continually click from the double-tap function?

No, because it works on a differential. So resting your fingers on the mouse as normal is fine. There may be a bit of an issue about registering clicks, which will take either pressure sensitivity at a basic (binary) level, or a change in user habits to lift the mouse and put it down again as the click action instead of the reverse.

But I think most likely some smart manufacturer will just put the capacitive surface over existing mouse buttons, which are wired to their normal function. People will still want the tactile click feedback, and this does not impair the functionality of the capacitive surface.

If there's no reason the choice must be exclusive, then the choice will be both.

Nope, there have been keyboards with trackpads for quite a long time now. Also, how are sales of USB trackpads for desktops? I remember buying a 9 pin serial port based one back when they just came out and were the hot new things. But I found it wasn't all that great.

The main reason I don't see touchpads taking over desktops is a simple one. A touchpad requires you to use fingers for both positioning AND clicking. It's an overloaded operation. What was one of the earliest improvements to touchpad design? The ability to tap to emulate a left click. Because it's a royal pain to position with fingers and click with the thumb, it makes common operations like dragging difficult and imprecise. Then throw in scrollwheel functionality and ugh! The reason it flourishes in laptops is because it doesn't require any space to operate, and most people wouldn't use a laptop they couldn't use on a lap. The eraser nub mice lost out because their control precision was even worse than the touchpad.

If people aren't buying aftermarket touchpads for their desktops in significant numbers let alone more than mice, I don't see the evidence for an actual user preference of the touchpad over the mouse. The market's had more than long enough for that kind of bias to assert itself and it hasn't.

The natural extension of multi-button mania is infinite buttons, i.e. a continuous surface. So is it a surprise that it's come to this?

I agree that the flat panel to mouse mapping may be akward since the mouse isn't flat. It's the main reason I favor the orb-shape on they showed, since it's got its own potential for a lot of interesting things, and has enough area that you could fit a lot of control functionality on it. But I think it will lose out on appeal and cost. I'd love it if at least one gets to market though, it looks like someone took the old SpaceOrb controller and did it right.

Yes but it's easy to compensate for the motor control by reducing mouse sensitivity. In general I find people who opt for the finger controlled mouse posture are used to needing to vary sensitivity to perform precise tasks (like CAD or sniping in games). Before the advent of mice with adjustable resolution controls, the only really practical way to change sensitivity was the analog one - to use arm movements for the big changes and fingers for the fine tuning. The opposing pressure to this was in the cases where people valued access to higher numbers of buttons over adjustable precision control, resulting in a different mouse holding posture that emphasises functionality at the exexpense of precision.

It's pretty easy to change mouse sensitivity to adjust for finer control, especially on modern mice. It's really hard to grow extra fingers to push more buttons. Therefore it's possible for one of these systems to compensate for its lack (by adding sensitivity controls on the mouse), but the reverse is not true. So I'm predicting you and the other guy will be in the minority on this since younger users tend to be more comfortable with extra buttons than us fossils who grew up with 2 and 3 button mice with cords and balls.

There are two general classes of mouse posture: finger-based and palm-based. There's also the "claw" one, which people contend the standard finger based posture is a subset of just less optimal for clicking response time. There's a heated contention between them among gamers who take things like this too seriously. Razer designs mice to fit the various styles, which they describe in their ergonomics guide: http://www2.razerzone.com/MouseGuide/html/palmgrip.php

Some people prefer to use the fingers for fine motor control, as you mention. Others prefer to just use a lower sensitivity and arm motion for positioning, freeing up finger control for more buttons. These inventions aren't aiming at a specific ergonomic target, they're adding functionality. If anything, a prevalence of multi-touch support in the future will dictate the common mouse holding posture, and I suspect you may be in for some grumbling about it for the forseeable future as it does not fit your natural tendency.

Your kids will wonder how the hell you can hold a mouse like that and still use it though.