While other systems require the driver to focus away from the road—either by selecting letters from endless menus or on a touchscreen keyboard—the new Audi MMI touch allows for blind typing: The driver just writes naturally with a finger on the touchpad. The pad is strategically located next to the steering wheel and in front of the gear shift, so the writing can be done in a comfortable position, without having to focus on any screen.

The MMI system—which recognizes Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean characters—also has a rotary pushbutton for old school people, as well as voice control, but only the touch system allows the driver to enter commands while talking on the cellphone or playing music. You gotta love those Audi smartypants. [Autospies and Jalopnik]

Is it a matter of preference and practice? Yes, but no.

Think about it. The distance it takes to move your hand from the QWERTY to the trackpad, usually below the spacebar, is much closer than the distance it takes to drop your hand on a mouse, reorientate your arm/wrist and fingers into place. And a trackpad's control scheme uses a finger, which has a lot more dexterity than an arm/wrist you use when handling a mouse. Also, the future is multitouch trackpads. No other control scheme can match the potential of pinching/scrolling with multiple fingers, zooming, etc.

The touchpad is also a really natural movement, practiced by everyone since childhood days of drawing in the sand on the beach, or fingerpainting. The only more natural movement is to trace movement on an actual screen, but any screen we use in a non mobile environment is too big and vertical to do this easily on, for extended periods of time. Besides, the touchpad itself would work great with a secondary LCD display under it, making it essentially, a touchpad.

So, here's to a future where the trackpad is everywhere. I look forward to it.

[SanwaNexus404, AdessoNexus404, Adesso2Nexus404, DinovoGiz, KeysonicKustomPC, SandbergTechhook, Adesso3Pcrush, MCEallproducts, McsaiteGeekalaert, TruFormProKeyboardco, ToshibaOverclockers, iKeyGadgetadvisor, iKey2Geekwithlaptop, FentexMiniGeekwithlaptop, EeeKeyboardDeviceDaily, LogitechHomeTheaterDialectical, special thanks to Quinton Ma for researching the models in this gallery.]

The SmartTrack Neo is a external USB trackpad that will allow you to use gestures to control your PC: Two fingers for scrolling and panning, victory sign to rotate, pinching to zoom in and out, and three fingers to flick through pages, photos, or whatever.

I like pinching—beyond trackpads—but why would you like to use this instead of using just a—more precise—mouse with the adequate buttons is beyond me. [Akihabara News]

This is still just a concept, but it's one of the rare ones that could, with a little ingenuity, plausibly get built. I mean, clappers did, so it sort of has to, right? [NewLaunches]

One of the biggest new features in the new MacBooks that Apple just unveiled is the glass trackpad, one that ditches the button in favor of turning the entire trackpad into a button. It also works with a bunch of new gestures, using up to four fingers to make doing things like switching between applications and flipping through a photo slideshow easier. It's pretty cool, but definitely not as cool as the concepts we've seen with a screen underneath, making the whole trackpad-is-the-buttons much more logical. Where's the screen, Apple?

Anyhow, this new trackpad has 39% more of a surface area than the old ones. As for the new gestures, some of them will include things like a two finger gesture to pinch and rotate for zooming and panning, a three finger gesture for swiping between photos or a four finger gesture for expose and app switching. Of course, all of this could have been done with the old plastic trackpads, making me wonder what, exactly, is the benefit of a glass trackpad with no screen underneath. I personally prefer the feel of my plastic trackpad to the screen of my iPhone for dragging my finger around on, as there's less resistance and fingerprint-gunkery on plastic.

From the press release:

The new smooth glass Multi-Touch trackpad on the MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro gives users almost 40 percent more tracking area than before, making it even easier to use Multi-Touch gestures like pinch, rotate and swipe. New gestures allow users to activate Exposé® or switch between applications at the touch of a fingertip. The entire trackpad surface is also a button, allowing users to both track and click virtually anywhere on the trackpad. Users can easily enable multiple virtual buttons in software, such as right-clicking.

[Live.Gizmodo.com]

While the raw tech isn't new (capacitive proximity sensors have been around in other forms for a while), this application is, and could prove useful in situations where the sterility is necessary. Alps says that they've still got a few problems to address, namely that device "often malfunctions." Of course, there's also the fact that using one of these things will invariably make you look like you're trying to perform a magic trick and/or dramatically faith-heal your laptop, two of the most surefire methods for remaining alone for the rest of your life. [TechOn]

Only install this on old laptops that don't have scrolling enabled. The new ones use a different trackpad that won't work. – Jason Chen

Project Page [Sourceforge]