Synaptics, the company responsible for the trackpads in many of today's laptops, has made a pair of announcements today geared at making laptops even thinner and lighter than they already are. Its new ThinTouch keyboards and ForcePad trackpads use enhanced touch sensitivity to reduce the thickness of both by about half.
The ThinTouch keyboard uses capacitive touch rather than the commonly-used scissor switches for input—the capacitive keys actually record your keystrokes, but the keys still move a few millimeters in order to simulate the same feeling of key travel that you get in most island-style keyboards today. Without the need to include a physical switch to register input, the keyboard can be made much thinner—up to 50 percent, according to Synaptics. Anandtech reports that the removal of physical switches also makes keyboards easier to backlight, and the mechanically simpler keys could potentially be more durable than current keyboards.
The ThinTouch keyboard simulates the key travel of a scissor switch keyboard, but capacitive keys actually register the input.
The ForcePad trackpad, on the other hand, seeks to become thinner by removing physical movement entirely. Rather than including physical buttons or one large clickable surface like current trackpads, the ForcePad is a large, immovable pressure-sensitive slab. Applying less pressure to the trackpad will simply move the mouse cursor, while applying more pressure on one or more points simulates a click (the ForcePad supports 64 pressure levels for up to five fingers at once, according to Anandtech). While the ThinTouch goes to pains to simulate a keyboard with physical switches, the ForcePad actually changes trackpad behavior to achieve its 40 percent thinner profile, and as such it may have a steeper learning curve than the ThinTouch keyboards.
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