Over the past year or so we’ve seen a growing trend of laptop makers eliminating touchpad buttons and instead using touchpads with integrated clicking, also known as ClickPads. While Apple has demonstrated that these ClickPads can actually be pretty useful tools, most of the Windows notebooks I’ve tried with ClickPads are plagued with problems: the cursor jumps when you accidentally…

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Synaptics is probably best known for making laptop touchpads. But the company also makes touchscreen displays, and Synaptics is bringing its touchy feely expertise to the display market, with the introduction of the new ClearPad 7200 capacitive touchscreen display line. These touch panels are designed for devices with screens up to 10.1 inches, and they’re pretty clearly aimed at the…

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Remember two years ago when 2-finger touchpad scrolling was all the rage? You ain’t seen nothing yet, because touchpad makers Synaptics have introduced support for four-finger gestures. The company’s new TouchPad-IS platform also features SmartSense technology to prevent accidental cursor activation when your palm hits the touchpad. Synaptics is also starting to demonstrate a new system called ClickEQ which is…

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Synaptics has introduced technology to support multitouch touchpads on systems running Linux. Up until now, Synaptics drivers were available primarily for Windows systems with supported touchpads. But the Synaptics Gesture Suite Linux (SGS-L) is available for a variety of Linux distributions including Fedora, Millos Linpus, Red Flag, SUSE, Ubuntu, and Xandros. Synaptics says Google Chrome OS and other operating systems…

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You know how the OLPC folks promised us a dual-screen netbook that would have a virtual keyboard that could pop up on one screen? It looks like we could be one step closer to getting that virtual keyboard. Synaptics, a company best known for making the touchpads used in millions of notebooks, is working on a new touchscreen technology called…

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MSI appears to have changed suppliers for the touchpad in the MSI Wind notebook. Blogeee reports that newer Wind laptops are using hardware and software from Sentelic instead of Synaptics.The change presents a few problems for end users: Synaptics touchpads are far more widely used, which means there’s much better support for them in the Linux community. There’s a better…

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