Magnetic Touch Screens Get Together, Make Phone Baby

Wired: Gadget Lab

The cell phone business has slowly moved away from two-part hinge designs to a more solid candy bar style, as found in the Blackberry and the iPhone.

But if the new design concept revealed today by Fujitsu and NTT DoCoMo is any indication, wireless technology and a little magnetism might give back cell phones its second piece back, with a touch-screen twist. It’s like a previously chopped off ugly Siamese brother that was brought back, because he’d suddenly lost some weight and bleached his teeth. 

The concept is split up into two playing card-sized touch screens, one a screen and the other a keyboard, and each contains specific hardware that balances the design. The screen piece includes the software and the video card, and the keyboard piece comes with the 3G and other communications.

In order to be able to use it with one hand, a magnetic bar is lined throughout the phone. That way, you can connect them in whichever way it’s more comfortable for the user. Unfortunately, we don’t know how much resistance the magnetism supports, and holding on to two screens might prove annoying and could lead to dropped phones and cracked screens.

Since there are two different pieces talking to each other through Bluetooth, you could have a series of apps that work with each other and are interchangeable with other people’s phones. It’s what I imagine a Nintendo DS style community would be like, if you could split your tiny console into two and give one piece to a friend.

Directly access System Preference panes in the Dock

macosxhints.com System tips

As of OS X 10.5 at least, dragging a preference pane into the right (Documents) side of the Dock will allow direct access to that preference with a single click. Drag any preference pane from /System » Library » PreferencePanes or /Library » PreferencePanes, and drop it into the dock. Click it, and System Preferences will open with that pane active.

I use this for a connection utility for a wireless USB modem (that has been implemented as a preference rather than an actual app). So I click the pane, then use the Connect button to activate the 3G modem. This is more logical than opening preferences.

This is close to, but not exactly the same, as several previous hints on this topic. I don’t know when it became possible, as I only have one Mac and its OS is kept up to date.

[robg adds: The preference panes are now basically like mini applications — you can place them in the sidebar or toolbar, and if double-clicked in the Finder, that pane will open in …

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