Last week my wife and I had our first vacation in years. We stayed at the Aria in the City Center in Las Vegas. We had a wonderful time

Normally when I book a hotel (usually on business), I am concerned about whether I will have decent, or any, Internet access. No worries here. The Aria has been written up as The High-Tech, Luxury, Surveillance Hotel (picture source). In the room, at the desk, there are ports for your ethernet cable and a whole bunch of other cables for video, audio, etc. Wireless access throughout the hotel is also quite good. This apparently is no coincidence. According to the aforementioned article, the Aria’s data center “reads the density of activity on the network, and adds Wi-Fi muscle to parts of the grid that require more bandwidth.”

But being a tablet-obsessed geek, what I noticed most was the in-room 7” touchscreen from which you can control lighting, temperature, curtains, spouse, entertainment, etc. You can do the same through the HDTV, but navigating that requires using your TV remote as a joystick. Much easier using the touchscreen. Supposedly there is or will be an iPad app so you can use your iPad as another touchscreen. However, since my wife now has my iPad, and I have control issues when it comes to room temperature, I didn’t raise that subject.

I’ve made obvious my preference for capacitive over resistive touchscreens. Capacitive touchscreens simply are far more responsive.

However, capacitive touchscreens have their disadvantages. One is that you can’t write on them with a stylus unless you have a special (and expensive) type of stylus. And even then the precision of your writing is less accurate than with a resistive screen.

It would nice to have our cake and eat it too; the sensitivity of a capacitive screen, but the accurate writing of a resistive screen. This screen nirvana may happen. Per Resistive display not out just yet!, a company called Touchco is promoting a technology which promises the accuracy of a resistive screen with the sensitivity of a capacitive screen. The article includes two videos. The Touchco site has even more.

Before you start dancing in the streets, Touchco’s resistive multi-touch could be the next step for touchscreens points out that the “video demos leave out one key element to that idea: they don’t have a touchscreen solution yet.” Yet, the article acknowledges that “the sensitivity and accuracy they demonstrate is stunning”, and sees “tremendous potential.”

So, this is a technology to watch for … but not count on. But it does illustrate that resistive and capacitive may not always be mutually exclusive alternatives.

I prefer capacitive to resistive touchscreens. I find the capacitive touchscreen more responsive to scrolling and other interaction.

However, one disadvantage is that a capacitive touchscreen doesn’t respond to a traditional stylus. Its capacitive nature requires responding to a finger tip or something else that acts as an electrical conductor.  Consequently, only special, conductive styluses work with a capacitive screen. This has long been an issue with the iPhone, and more recently with other capacitive touch screen phones, such as the HTC HD2.

Teno Pogo Sketch and Dagi Transparent stylus are two styluses which do work with a capacitive screen  The video, courtesy of wmpoweruser.com, compares the two styluses with an HD2. The verdict? Well, watch the video.

Update: HTC Capacitive stylus. Or forget the stylus altogether, and wear gloves.