Thinking about how your phone’s touchscreen operates, you might assume that the so-called optical pads that have been making appearances on recent BlackBerrys ( among other devices ) operate in a similar fashion — but you’d be wrong. RIM’s official BlackBerry blog is chiming in today to drop some knowledge on us dullards, and it turns out that “optical” isn’t just a cute nickname — the pads do actually operate in much the same way as modern desktop mice, using a low-res infrared camera to capture movement across the surface and translate it into movement.
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RIM’s optical trackpads: they weren’t joking about the ‘optical’ part