Word: touchscreen
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Since the country's colonial days, concerns of voter fraud have inspired ever-more complicated ways to cast one's ballot. Depending on where you live, you may vote tomorrow with a lever, a punch card, a marker or a touchscreen. As election scholar Andrew Gumbel notes, the U.S. has been both a "living experiment in the expansion of democratic rights" and a "world-class laboratory for vote suppression and election-stealing techniques...
...same time, the election and technology bred another, kinder-and- dorkier group of stars: the geekocracy. CNN's John King broke down election returns and poll figures on a touchscreen "magic wall," while NBC guru Chuck Todd crunched numbers on what resembled an electronic Risk board. Meanwhile, a raft of bloggers used the Web's strength--indulging obsessiveness--to create temples of poll analysis. Chief among them was Nate Silver, a baseball-statistics nut at whose FiveThirtyEight.com habitués debate weighting averages and tracking-poll internals until the wee hours...
...touchscreen works just fine, but I often found myself reaching for the built-in trackball instead. As BlackBerry aficionados will probably agree, the impressive precision and frictionless gliding of a trackball makes clicking on links quicker and easier. It's also indispensable for selecting text to cut and paste (something you can't do on the iPhone...
...problem with other touchscreen-based phones, says Lazaridis, is that "there's no tactile response - they mix navigation with confirmation." When you try to click a Web link on the iPhone, for example, it's all too easy to accidentally tap the wrong spot and launch the link that was just above or below the one you really wanted. That wastes time, and is especially annoying on a wireless device, whose battery life is precious...
...Storm eliminates that problem with the clickable screen. It further improves the touchscreen experience with two other features designed to separate navigation and confirmation, which, Lazaridis told TIME, is the trademark of the Storm. One is the virtual keyboard: each letter lights up as you tap it so you know instantly whether you hit the right key. The second is the cursor: as you move your finger across the screen, a small arrow - which looks like a mouse cursor - appears to show exactly where your finger is pointed. Then, to confirm your selections, you push down on the entire screen...