Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Whatever you think about Apple, it has a way of introducing hardware features that are quickly adopted by competing phones. By no means did Apple invent gold phones or fingerprint sensors (and the company does occasionally follow others, as it did with large screens), but once it started using these things in the iPhone they became common features in more and more Android handsets. Today Synaptics announced the ClearPad 3700, a new touchscreen controller for smartphones that will add "ClearForce variable force sensing" to smartphones that use it.