By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY
You can use your finger to "paint" on an Acer computer that has Windows 7 and a touch-screen. Microsoft is betting PC makers produce more touch-screens.
By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY
Most every computer user is a whiz at pointing and clicking with a mouse. If Microsoft (MSFT) has a say, you'll become equally adept at touching and tapping the PC screen directly with your fingers.
As part of the company's recent launch of Windows 7, the vastly improved successor to Windows Vista, Microsoft hopes to usher in a new era for touch-based computing. And that means smudging your paw prints all over the surface of the screen – to finger paint, play music, spin a globe or enlarge and rotate photos.
VIDEO: Watch the touch features of Windows 7 in action
TV: Tune in to Baig on ABC's 'America This Morning' Fridays 4:30 a.m. ET or check local listings
Multitouch, or the ability to manipulate the display screen with one or more fingers, is built directly into Microsoft's latest operating system. "We believe in touch," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says.
You'll need hardware with special touch-capable screens. Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba and other PC makers have or will shortly trot out touch-ready computers with Windows 7.
TOUCHING: Three multitouch models get a look
With the technology fused into Windows 7, PC companies and software developers can apply their own touches on top of the operating system.
On HP's TouchSmart 600t all-in-one PC, for example, you can tap tiles to launch Twitter and recipe applications. In a Rhapsody music application, you can search for an artist or song by "writing" the name directly on the screen with your fingers.
The SimpleTap feature on Lenovo's ThinkPad T400s laptop lets you turn on Wi-Fi, alter volume and brightness and handle other basic functions by tapping onscreen tiles.
"Direct manipulation is easier to interact," maintains Ian LeGrow, a group product manager on the Windows team at Microsoft. "Our task is to make these habit-forming."
Such a task won't come easy. Because of years of doing it one way, you may well be inclined to reach for the mouse and keyboard even when there's a touch alternative.
While the ergonomics may seem unnatural at first, the truth is that folks touch computer screens all the time, getting cash at an ATM, receiving boarding passes at the airport or printing pictures at a photo kiosk. And you're a master of touch if you carry an iPhone or certain other smartphones. HP has suggested that touch is great for "walk-up computing" – quickie behaviors such as browsing photos or consulting a family calendar.
"The great thing about touch is you don't have to teach anybody," says John Cook, a marketing vice president at HP. Joe Roberts, an executive vice president at Corel, adds, "I think it's unlearning –that you don't need your mouse and keyboard to do this."
The demand for touch-screen PCs is rising. Amy Leong, research director at the Gartner research firm, says the number of touch-screen PC units shipped will surpass 6 million in 2010, nearly quadrupling 2008 shipments. She says about 10% of the new PC models coming this year will support touch technology. According to iSuppli forecasts, the global market for touch-screens will reach $6.4 billion by 2013, up from $3.4 billion in 2008.
'In search of an application'
It'll take time for the software to catch up. "Touch is technology in search of an application right now," says Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm.
Some software – digital drawing programs, for instance – lend themselves naturally to touch. For example, Corel Paint it! Touch is a new $40 program designed specifically with touch in mind. You can take a photograph and apply a painting style to it (watercolor, impressionist, etc.) by tapping the screen.
SpaceClaim is about to bring out sophisticated 3D modeling software for engineers that exploits multitouch. It's not for consumers, but it shows off the possibilities. You can pan, rotate and zoom in on 3D models. "It's like something out of Minority Report," says Blake Courter, co-founder of the Concord, Mass., company.
Ubisoft has been previewing R.U.S.E., a wartime strategy game that will be among the first to take advantage of multitouch in Windows 7.
But turning the mouse and keyboard into benchwarmers is, at best, a touch-and-go proposition. In fact, touch is meant to augment and complement the mouse and keyboard rather than supplant them.
"Some things are just inherently easier to do with touch," says Al Monro, CEO of NextWindow in New Zealand, a supplier of optical multitouch displays for major manufacturers. For example, rather than click through menu commands to resize fonts on the screen, you can just touch the text directly to make it happen. From Microsoft's point of view, touch is one of the "natural user interfaces" – vision, ink and speech are others – that reflect a longtime passion of co-founder Bill Gates. The touch capabilities built into the latest Windows share elements with the 30-inch interactive tabletop computers known as Microsoft Surface, which Microsoft first deployed in 2008.
Early Surface tables are in hotels, cruise ships, retail stores and other businesses. From the tabletop, you can order drinks or display maps. Eventually, some cheaper version of the tables might show up in your living room; you or the kids might use them to play games or splatter digital photos across the surface.
Touch has barely scratched the surface on home computers, but putting the capability in the operating system ought to make it more accessible to consumers – and it opens up all sorts of possibilities for programmers. "I think it helps any technology get more popular if it's included in Windows," Ballmer says.
There are still challenges. Take price. "If it costs me an extra $20, I'll probably get (touch)," Monro says. "If it's an extra 500 bucks, probably not."
Dell (DELL) says the rough premium on its touch-ready Studio 17 notebook will be about $100 over a similar system without touch. The Lenovo premium is about $400. If touch machines gain traction, you can expect prices to fall.
Microsoft has been championing touch in Tablet PCs for some time. But though useful for students who take handwritten notes or among business users who must fill out forms, the machines barely make a blip among the masses. Tablets use a digital pen or stylus. That's not the case with the new crop of mainstream-oriented touch PCs.
Despite the push from Microsoft, the main impetus behind touch these days, at least for ordinary folks, comes from rival Apple. "The iPhone is the real kicker to the touch industry," says Amichai Ben-David, CEO of Israel-based touch-screen hardware maker N-trig.
For its part, Apple (AAPL) has resisted the kind of touch-screen computers now emerging from the PC camp. But there's speculation, if no actual confirmation from Apple, that the company might unveil a multitouch-based tablet computer relatively soon.
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