This year at CES a couple things struck me. One of them is that “touch is in.” There was Microsoft’s Surface with its well-publicized multi-touch:
The Surface units got a lot of attention in the Microsoft booth–too bad the three units they had on display were tucked away in a cave on the side of the mammoth Microsoft booth.
Of course, Surface is lots more than a true, multi-touch device, it is capable of interacting physical devices and tags so that Surface can interact with them in interesting ways. But for this discussion, I’m focusing on the fact that Surface supports touch and from what I was noticing in the crowd reaction that most people were interested in seeing it.
The Surface wasn’t the only large surface touch device at CES however. Sanyo was showing a short throw projector with an integrated touch technology (the booth rep said the technology came from another company, which they didn’t have any information on). Here’s a snapshot of a person demoing this clever vertical touch surface:
Sanyo was demoing a couple touch games that got my imagination going. It’s not a Wii killer, but it shows how powerful interactive projections can be.
Touch wasn’t just big on large displays. There were plenty of iPhone-influenced small touch devices too–some were phones, some were MP3, some were MIDs and some were UMPCs.
One of the more interesting devices along these lines that I saw was a square shaped UMPC-looking device from Toshiba.
Like the iPhone, this as yet unnamed device supports capacitive touch as well as simple, single-finger gestures. I’ll blog more about this device in another post. I just wanted to mention its touch support here.
(Toshiba says the device will be available sometime later this year–depending in large part on when Intel releases the low-power processor it uses. This will probably be sometime around the second half of the year.)
Of course, touch is also become more and more common on the Tablet PC side. HP introduced a new, sleek and stylish Tablet called the TX2000 that supports both an active digitizer and touch.
Smartly the touch capability is disabled when the digitizing pen is near the display–so you don’t get any false actions if you rest your hand on the display when writing or drawing. I can’t wait to see more Tablet software optimized for touch. There’s lots that can be done here.
There’s no doubt in my mind, touch is here.
