Scientists in the UK have thought differently about touchpad designs: their system peeks at your fingertips to see what you're touching. It can sense when you're pushing on something and how hard, so everything —even a 3D uneven surface— could be made into a touchpad. Quite why they chose to demo this with a purring rock we're not sure. But we like it.

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Kodak's Quick Touch photo frames don't quite go all the way on being touchscreen, though they're spinning that as a plus, since you don't leave grimy fingerprints on your screen. Instead, the border itself is a touchpad, so you can scroll through pics with swipes of your finger.

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I'm stoked that even though the new MacBook Pro touchpad looks the same and is the same size, it's loaded with multitouch! And LED backlights available across the range! But I was curious why the new MacBook (standards) don't have either. So I asked them. Here's the official Apple answer: The multitouch technology is a feature of the MacBook Pro and Air, but not the MacBook. Apple has already committed to transitioning all machines to LED backlights, and will do so when economically and technically feasible. UPDATE: Sources at iFixit have told us that the Broadcom BCM5974 Multitouch controller chip, the hardware component for multitouch in the iPhone and Macbook Air, costs only US$2.95, so cost isn't the prohibiting factor when it comes to multitouch in the standard Macbook.

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This Touchpad app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is similar to a regular VNC app, but instead of mapping screen taps like a touchscreen, it maps screen taps like the touchpad on your laptop. You'll get what we mean if you watch the video. Connect your iPhone to your computer via Wi-Fi and start gesturing around the screen—it'll be just like you were fiddling with a touchpad. People who hook up their Mac or PC to their TVs to act as a HTPC should definitely pick this up. [Touchpad iPhone]

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These Apple patents show standard trackpad, basic multitouch and gonzo "Advanced Multitouch" never seen before on shipping products. The advanced UI includes thumb/forefinger/middlefinger combos for saving, closing and opening files, as well as cut, copy and paste. (The patents assume the system can detect the differences between different fingers. [Macrumors]

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LG's new KF510 slider mobile is a skinny 11mm deep, with a touchpad control, slide-out conventional keys, and an animation-loaded user interface. The "Touch Lighting Phone" also packs a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, and is metal-framed, with graduated metal paintwork. Available in March, around US$330, not much else is known about the phone yet. [GSM Arena]

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According to a patent filed by Apple, the company's MacBook touchpads and signature iPod clickwheel might be in for a very visual overhaul. The proposed technology will allow for both lighting and color responses to user interaction. If Apple follows through with its plans, when you get to use touchpads and clickwheels on next generation products, you might get a bit of a show. While most of it sounds fairly cosmetic, the idea of a touchpad that glows brighter with more pressure, follows around tactile input by the user, and changes color sounds pretty damn cool to us, and helps make things more intuitive on the user's end. The 34 page patent outlines the plans which sound like anything from an LCD touchscreen to a traditional touchpad backlit with LEDs. From the patent:

By way of example, it may be desirable to provide visual stimuli at the touch pad so that a user can better operate the touch pad. For example, the visual stimuli may be used (among others) to alert a user when the touch pad is registering a touch, alert a user where the touch is occurring on the touch pad, provide feedback related to the touch event, indicate the state of the touch pad, and/or the like.

You might be looking at plans for the iPhone nano. Here's a patent application by Apple, dated today, that shows a simplified input pad with numbers on it, and it could conceivably be a simple follow-on to the iPhone. The touchpad "displays graphical elements to indicate input areas of the touchpad," and as you can see, it displays those symbols in a circular arrangement. Not only is this evidence of a possible next generation of simplified Apple cellphones, it also indicates that Apple is probably not going to abandon the click wheel just yet. It all makes sense: Apple has a highly capable smart phone, but what about a basic cellphone, lower-priced and simplified, for the rest of us who just want to talk and don't necessarily need to carry a $600 computer around with them 24/7? Apple's Patent Application [US Patent and Trademark Office, via Unwired View]