James Fee
09-21-2004, 02:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mp3.com/story/feature_ipod_wheel.html' target='_blank'>http://www.mp3.com/story/feature_ipod_wheel.html</a><br /><br /></div>"<i>There are many reasons to like the iPod, but to me, the most compelling one is the scrollwheel. There's never been anything better for negotiating the prodigious amounts of music that we're lucky enough to be able to fit into our pockets these days. The scrollwheel has been through three iterations. The first one actually rotated; then there was the touch-sensitive one; and finally there's the clickable one found on the iPod Mini and fourth-generation iPod. I'd always assumed that this bit of design genius sprung from Apple's R&D labs, but, in fact, I discovered that a company called Synaptics, which primarily makes touchpads for laptops, actually designed this little piece of navigational heaven, in accordance with Apple's stringent design requirements.</i>"<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/ipod_wheel_mini.gif" /><br /><br />A really interesting article on the scrollwheel and the company who makes it, Synaptics. Synaptics seems to have really hit on something huge here, since both the Creative Zen Touch and HP's new iPaq hx4705 have gone with the same technology.