Photos: Reinventing the scroll wheel

A recent visit by CNET News.com to Synaptics' headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., turned up several notable concept designs that might make their way into future PCs.

The company, perhaps best-known for its iPod click wheel, actually receives the bulk of its revenue from designing and building touchpads for notebook PCs. One example of a current product featuring Synaptics' technology is Toshiba's Qosmio entertainment notebook. This is a dual-mode touchpad, which means it can either operate in cursor mode or in multimedia mode by tapping the button in the upper right-hand corner with the arrows. The touchpad can be used to adjust the volume or launch different applications when in multimedia mode, as shown here.