How many people actually use the stylus pen on the small, quick tasks? We bet most of you actually enjoy touching your touch screen with your fingers. Well, a computer science student and a developer at Microsoft
Research have created a technique designed to make it easier to select
items on a mobile-phone screen with a finger rather than a pointed
stylus.

Daniel Vogel, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, and Patrick Baudisch, a scientist at Microsoft Research, developed the system - called Shift - based on a previous technology called Offset Cursor. 

Shift only displays the image when necessary, so if a user touches a large item, Shift doesn't really disturb the user.

Needless to say, this system can be very interesting to game developers
designing games for touch screen enabled devices (such as PocketPC,
Palm, iPhone and DS).

Vogel and Baudisch published a paper about Shift at the Computer Human Interaction Conference earlier May. They also created a short video with a demonstration of how Shift works. Grab it all here. (you can watch a demonstration movie here)