First post niggers! Frosty piss! Hard penis! HAHAHAHA!!

You know that the first product is going to rebrand the "I" to mean "integrated" and charge $800 for the first device.

You can get that if you ignore cheap right now. So i'd give it a few years max. Battery life is hard to get that high though it is something the industry is stupidly ignoring. My thinkpad CAN do 10 but on minimal settings and isn't a touchscreen. By volume my battery is about 10% of the laptop (ignoring the screen). I'd be comfortable giving up some speed and have a battery that takes twice as much or better still, 2 batteries so I could likely run forever. It is clearly doable, there are many laptops with smaller forms not to mention that inside this there is a lot of empty space anyways. (Plus I really don't need a 56k modem or 3 card readers or external hdd or 1394. To be honest since usb came out I fail to see the point of card readers, fax modems have been useless for at least 10years, and usb is fast enough for an external drive til usb 3.0 becomes common. I would however appreciate a mini-usb port or 2, it could replace headphones/mic/w/e)

Sorry for running off topic...
I question the durability of these printable touchpads. They can't replace anything if they wear out. No-one will be replacing their touchpads. If I have to ship my laptop/phone in for a few days every other month it better save me 50% of the cost of the whole product so I can buy 2.

Not sure what the GP is talking about, but I was under the impression this sort of technology has been around for a very long time (based on description in summary and article). I only see two really new bits of design here, one being the conductive element changing conductivity based on pressure (this to a certain extent has been used before, but it sounds like this material offers finer sensitivity than previous approaches), and more crucially the software used to process the signal coming from this thing. For all intents and purposes the hardware side of this thing sounds decidedly ho-hum, but the software that's doing the interpolation from the resistance data seems like the magic that actually makes it worth anything.

They also bring up an excellent point towards the end of the article where they point out one of the biggest challenges is going to be integrating this thing into a display. On the plus side I imagine it should be fairly straightforward to layer it over a piece of glass, but I'd be worried about scratching and such as any damage to the top grid would ruin the pressure sensitivity around that area and who knows what the software driving the thing would interpret that as.