Touch-Screen PC Is All the Rage

Just to show that touch-screen input will be the technology to spur the next wave of PC upgrades, The Inquirer is reporting HP announced that they will have touch-screen computers in eighteen months.  Interestly, this will be available even before Windows 7, Vista successor, is out on the market. 

Onxo believe that while HP will implement its own touch technology, there is no fear that once Windows 7 is out, users will have to learn a whole new set of touch gestures.

However, we won't know the full extent of what HP touch will entail.  Dell has already release the Latitude XT, making it the first multitouch laptop.  Early this year, Apple refreshed its professional line of laptops, Macbook Pro, and the Macbook Air with multitouch pads enable very much the same functionality as the iPhone and iPod Touch. 

We'll definitely see the rest of the computer industry fall in line as they clamor for the attention of consumers and businesses.  There will be fantastic claims but Onxo will do its best to help sort through this. 

Note:  Already some mobile device makers has described some of their phones to be multitouch but the meaning of it escapes me.  While I applaud the efforts put into these phones, their definition of "multi-touch" apparently is not the same as the one used to described the iPhone's capability.  I do expect true multi-touch functions to come from other companies shortly. 

Related Articles:

• MacPad or MacTablet 
• A little bit more into multi-touch technology and its future.
  

MacDailyNews: Macbook DS is right!

Want the future now?  Multi-touch on your laptop?  Well, it may come sooner on the Macbook if anything like this demo is what all the rumors are about, or close to it.  MacDailyNews (it's a very pro-Apple site) is where I first saw this.


Media Computing Group has utilized the MultiTouch.framework (native on Cocoa - a programming framework for the Mac) to create their own multitouch application for demo.  They've also got a youtube video of this.  


What's amazing is that they've got it working through their Macbook and using an iPhone as the multitouch pad.  Honestly, wtih Apple's remote app and Google's Telekinesis, is it too far a stretch to believe the next step is to bring multitouch goodness through the iPhone or 3rd party platform?  And not just for Mac but also Windows Machine?  






Note: This is for iPhone users who runs Windows instead of OS X. If this is released, you're likely to see this work on a Mac only. I'm not a programmer but perhaps some ingenious coder may come to your rescue. I use both OS's so I'm covered.


I've included video of Microsoft's Surface to balance things out.







While it's kind of cool, don't hold your breath if you want to see Surface for $1000 or so for home or office use. If anything, the initial adoption of any kind of touch-based technology will be on trackpads or specifically designed pads.



Here is what kind of got folks started on touch or gesture based user interface. No, I'm not talking Minority Report.




This is even better. Perhaps there was something to those Macbook Touch rumors after all. We'll just have to see.