> Imagine how infuriating it would be for Steve Jobs
> if Motorola, not Apple (AAPL), was first with an
> entirely button-free smartphone?

Next day headline: “Apple buys Nokia.”

Sensitive Objects has a very difficult technological challenge ahead of it to implement anything approaching the sophistication of capacitive multi-touch technology.

Fingerworks was ahead of where Sensitive Objects is now when they were quietly acquired by Apple in 2005.

For a company that has abandoned software innovation to Google and placed it's bets on differentiating itself from the myriad other Android purveyors solely through hardware, this seems like a poorly researched throw of the dice. Hopefully they threw a cheap pair.

The capacitive touch technology used in current phones is well proven and capable of multi-touch. If there is ANY advantage to the acoustic touch technique, it's that it can be retrofit to existing surfaces, as it's place only along the edge. Capacitive sensing requires that the sensing surface be backed by a conductive matrix. While that matrix may be inexpensive, its cost is proportional to surface area. This may give some advantage to acoustic technologies (which have been around for decades) in large surface applications.

Absent any ability to differentiate its software from other Android based phones, Motorola (and others) are forced to differentiate through hardware.