Quote:
Originally Posted by Stridr
Last weekend I gave the Kindle to my Mom and showed her how to use it. I just checked in to see how things are going with it. She has two complaints.
-- She says that when she touches the right side of the screen to turn the page, it won't turn, and she'll have to touch it sometimes 3-4 times before anything happens.
-- She also says that sometimes when she is trying to turn the page by touching the area in the lower right corner the font will suddenly get very small and/or the options menu will pop up even though she is NOT touching the area near the top of the screen.
|
The Kindle Paperwhite (both 1 and 2) use capacitive touchscreens, similar to those on modern smartphones. Capacitive touch is very easy to use because it doesn't require pressure to be applied (unlike so called resistive touchscreens), but it does require conducting electricity and that can result in two kinds of issues:
1) If the touching instrument isn't conducting electricity, the touch won't register.
2) If there is something else conducting electricity on the screen, the screen might register two or more touch points instead.
The first angle affects mainly women, because fingernails don't conduct electricity - and in most cultures long fingernails are usually in the female domain. If you mother has long fingernails, she can't use those to click the screen - ask her to use her fingertips instead or consider buying a capacitive stylus that has a soft conducting tip. (Very few touch smartphones work with long fingernails, Nokia Lumia is one of the rare ones with new supersensitive screens.)
The second point goes the cleanliness, possible products used on hands and how the device is held. Make sure your mother doesn't hold the device in a way that the touch screen gets pressed from multiple points - she needs to hold it from the bezel, not from the screen. It sounds like the text getting smaller is an accidental pinch to zoom (out) where two touch-points have registered. Also, again something that might affect women more often than men in our culture, if she uses some products on her hands/skin, that might leave residue on the screen, those can leave "ghosts" on the screen - one can try to drop a few droplets of water (very conductive) on a capacitive touch screen and see how it goes berserk.
Finally, Kindle Paperwhite 2 has an options menu that comes when swiping upwards from the bottom, so that gesture has actually registered correctly it sounds.