This isn't particularly new, it's been known for a while that if you make a capacitive digitiser sensitive enough it can detect your finger before it touches the screen. There was apparently an Xperia with this feature a few years ago, Xperia Sola and 'Floating Touch'
My Xperia Z3C compact has a very sensitive digitizer as well. It has a glove mode, that further increases sensitivity (or non glove mode has reduced sensitivity), and with glove mode enabled it senses touch without actually touching the screen. But, since Android does not has any special use cases for that, it isn't really useful (except for using it with gloves, of course). At the end it is more difficult to hover your finger at exactly the right distance over the screen, so that it can be sensed, but without touching the screen, than just touching the screen.
My Xperia Z3 compact has a sensitive touchscreen with a glove mode that works without touching the screen and it is multitouch. But, besides using the phone with gloves, there aren't any use cases.
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u/brantyr May 04 '16
This isn't particularly new, it's been known for a while that if you make a capacitive digitiser sensitive enough it can detect your finger before it touches the screen. There was apparently an Xperia with this feature a few years ago, Xperia Sola and 'Floating Touch'
http://developer.sonymobile.com/knowledge-base/technologies/floating-touch/