The technology world came a buzz last week with Microsoft’s announcement of Surface. Surface is a beautiful and innovative concept table computer which gives the user a 30″ horizontal, multi-touch interface – that is to say a very advanced touch screen with specialized GUI. Think of a giant version of the Apple iPhone or possibly a more feature complete version of Jeff Han’s multi-touch experiments. Perhaps you saw Tom Cruise’s PC in Minority Report?

Regardless of precedent, the demo movies are impressive.

That said, the best commentary I read yet came from David Pogue, of the New York Times, on his blog:

As the new world of multi-touch-screen computing dawns, you’ll see a lot of demos involving photo stretching and Web surfing demos. But you will *never* see word processors, e-mail programs, spreadsheets, databases or accounting programs.

That’s because touch-screen computers are terrible for these mainstream computing tasks. Typing of any kind, in fact, is a nightmare when you can’t feel the keys. It’s inaccurate, slow and unsatisfying.

As cool as dragging pictures on to your cell phone is, we’ll still need to balance our checkbooks. A keyboard is still a very useful device for entering data.

David, like myself, was positive overall about the product. We also agree that there is a great deal of hype surrounding it as well. David especially notes the all specialized peripheral hardware that would be necessary to make all the functions shown in the demos actually exist. Alas, we should all appreciate any advance that get us closer to our own personal jet packs.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.