In iPad’s wake, Amazon buys innovative multitouch company for future Kindle design

Amazon obviously has a lot to fear from the iPad, and they seem to know it, if their latest acquisition is anything to go by: they have just purchased Touchco, a small company that makes very cheap multitouch displays. Oh, and they are merging it into their Kindle division. Duh.

Touchco’s touchscreen technology is pretty cool: not only is it cheap, but it’s sensitive to pressure, and can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches. It’s also totally transparent, which means it won’t mute the full color LCD screens for which it is designed like other touchscreens solution.

It’s pretty clear Amazon’s planning a truly impressive, full-color, multitouch update to the Kindle… but they need it sooner rather than later. The iPad’s not even out yet, and it looks like Apple’s won the battle. Better crack the whips on those Touchco engineers, Amazon.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Hardware, iPad, News |

http://macme.org Macme – Apple News Site & Forums
Hmm, if I were amazon I would be scared. Apple are going to sell loads of iPad’s. alot of people I know, who have never brought an Apple product before, are going to get the iPad.
Montana Bob
Amazon so scared of Apple’s iPad…. so scared that Amazon now wants to become a mobile device hardware company? Let me guess, Amazon’s next move would be to buy out a small CPU/chip manufacturing firm, kinda like Apple bought out PA Semi.
The ones that should be concerned the most are Amazon Investors. They must be scratching their heads and asking “WTF?! What’s Amazon going to do next? Get into the PC hardware business? The smartphone business? Gonna announce the creation of its own Mobile operating system in order to compete better with Apple, Microsoft and Google? WTF!!!!!!”
http://www.toxicspark.com Andrew Macdonald
The iPad is gonna be the Kindle Killer, in my opinion. Even if Amazon comes out with a full-colour kindle, it’ll not be a patch on iPad.
But who knows what Amazon has up their sleeves.
mysterian1729
> can detect an infinite number of simultaneous touches
uh………….no.
ETorpedo
The iPad has set the bar pretty high. The only reason I am considering the iPad is to be able to carry my books around. I almost bought a Kindle until I found out that Apple was coming out with the iPad. I am eager to get my hands on the iPad and see if it will do what I need it to do in terms of books, I hope it will do what you can do on the Kindle. I know people who have Kindles and they love them.
poppa
Apple have started the ball rolling with the iPad .
Now Google have released a video of a concept tablet of their own.
Will the Kindle survive with more Tablet computers appearing by the end of the year.
http://gizmodo.com/5461948/is-this-how-a-google-tablet-will-look-in-action