It all sounds impossibly complex, but 's Nathan Ingraham was favorably impressed, talking with Tactus CEO and co-founder Craig Ciesla and actually handling a based on an smartphone.

In , Ingram says the channels are "invisible, for the most part." He also writes about the actual experience of touching the screen: "The key outlines did provide some feedback as to where individual keys start and end, but the physical act of 'pressing' a key didn't provide much feedback yet. Much of the time, it felt as though the capacitive touchscreen was triggered before you had a chance to feel the travel of the fluid-filled area. ... Still, once you notice the outlines of where the keys appear and disappear, they're hard to un-see (though we expect future versions will more naturally integrate the microfluid channels)."

Those qualifications alone, given Apple's obsession with industrial design and UI details, never mind Tactus' clear statement that first products won't be available until mid-2013, make it clear you can forget about this innovation appearing this year on the iPhone 5.

But this is the iOSphere, which rarely lets facts get in the way of enthusiasm.

Dave Smith, writing for , , and then linked it to another recent patent disclosure covered in early May , for a "flexible OLED display." Without going into the almost numbingly detailed speculation by Patently Apple, the patent seems to have some type of flexible surface, but uses stacked layers of "piezoelectric elements" to create the physical buttons or keys.