Just recently had a huge bug with my Ipod. The top half of the touch screen was basicially dead for no reason at all. Apple replaced my ipod and all and I'm happy, but while I was freaking out over my broken iPod, I noticed something. All the extra space around the touchscreen, was touchable, and controled things on the touchscreen, but only on the broken iPod. The new replacement doesn't do this, and my other one didn't before. I wish apple would use this in some way, because with my experience, once whatever happened inside my ipod, happened, the space outside the touchscreen worked better than the touchscreen, it was easier to play, pause and change pages of apps, mostly because the touchscreen didn't work. I wanted to know if anyone with a lot more tech info on the ipod could explain why this happened to me... (aslo if my wifi hadn't stopped working, I would have the highest possible score on dooldle jump because this glitch made it go insane)
haha no I'm serious, if you pressed the piece above the touchscreen, you could do all kinds of stuff, pause if you clicked the very top left, open the 1st app in the second row from the top if you pressed the opposite of where the home button is, and go back and forth in safari if you clicked the space between the screen and the edge of the ipod on the left and right. and if you opened something like the notes app, it would type random letters over and over. And when I played doulbde jump to test the acelrometer, it glitched the app. I swear. My ipod must of have had something seriously wrong with it. Rebooting, Restoring, etc.. did nothing and apple tech was as confused as me. That's why he decided to replace my iPod.. I'm 100% serious here..
Pretty unbelieveble, to be honest. It's a pity You did not take a video or picture of You using the touchscreen... without the touchscreen.
There's nothing mysterious about that. The entire glass screen is coated with indium tin oxide, a transparent, conductive layer that gives the glass its capacitance. The capacitive touch works by placing sensors in each of the four corners of the device that measure electrical resistance along the ITO surface. When the screen is touched, the sensors find the location of where the screen has been touched by triangulating the point of greatest resistance. (Your skin has a greater level of resistance than the ITO coating, so electricity flows more slowly through your skin than it does the coating, and some of it gets lost. By measuring the amount of electricity between one sensor and the next, it can determine where the touch occurred.) The iPhone/Touch then translates those sensor readings into X/Y coordinates on the screen. Because this is done through programming, it can limit the area of recognition to just the area above the LCD display, even though the entire glass surface is capable of registering touch. If the device's touch sensors malfunction, or the ITO coating wears thin in certain areas, or the software that interprets sensor data becomes corrupted somehow, then it's entirely possible you could get strange touch readings, even if it's outside the screen area.
So the untold part of the story is that you went drinking with an apple employee and "found" an iPod touch prototype, amirite?
Well, yes, it is. But understanding why it's broken and behaving the way it is helps discourage attributing unexpected behaviour to hidden features. It isn't doing anything it wasn't made to do, it's just not doing what it was told to do. In other words, it's broken.
Yeah. Remember that the parts above and below the screen are meant as "dead zones" where you can rest your hands/fingers and grip the phone. It wouldn't be very comfortable to use if they didn't exist.
Yes. Once my iPod started playing meteor blitz music without me even opening it. I forgot what app it was from and had to search through my entire iPod to find it and close the app.
