HP has joined the touch bandwagon by releasing a PC that has a touch-sensitive screen, allowing you to use your fingers to scroll through menus and files. But despite looking good on paper, and on TV commercials aired on primetime, the TouchSmart failed to impress us.
Sure, the TouchSmart software is easy to use and can give you a ‘hands-on’ experience while taking a look at photos and videos. But when it came to using the touch screen on Windows Vista, we were plagued with small icons that were hard to press and unresponsive icons that needed to be tapped over and over.
Fortunately, HP has included a wireless keyboard and mouse with the package, making it easier for consumers to use the IQ508a for Windows-based programs.
The unit sports a piano black finish and is on the heavy side as all of its major components are installed behind the touchscreen. Up front, users can find a 22-inch screen, built-in speakers, webcamera, and a ‘Home’ key that automatically launches the TouchSmart function.
Then I dropped my iPhone — it slipped! — from about three feet, and it hit the sidewalk. Apple’s design gurus had miscalculated — one fall and the screen shattered across the top corner. Little bits of glass began to chip away.
The Apple store had bad news. The only way to replace a cracked iPhone screen is to buy a whole new iPhone.
How many of you have had to replace an iPhone (or iPod Touch) due to screen damage/dropping?
A new concept design by designer James Piatt shows what this might look like. It’s a compelling idea, and one that I believe is inevitable, simply because of the appeal of having the largest possible screen and the necessity of fitting inside a pocket.
KFAR SABA, Israel & AUSTIN, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–N-trig, the provider of DuoSense™ technology combining pen and zero-pressure touch for mobile and fixed computers into a single device, announced today that it is offering a software development kit (SDK) for multi-touch gestures to independent service vendors (ISVs) and industry partners. With its revolutionary approach to Hands-on computing™, N-trig’s SDK can be downloaded on any tablet PC with DuoSense technology.
The multi-touch gestures SDK enables ISVs to add multi-touch functions to current or future applications, providing a more hands-on experience for the user. N-trig’s multi-touch currently enables functions such as rotating, zooming in and out, panning, and pinching. However, this is only the beginning of multi-touch manipulation, and N-trig is continuing to develop its technology and will be releasing more multi-touch features in the future.
“True multi-touch functionality is the future for computing devices,” said Amihai Ben-David, CEO of N-trig. “By providing a platform that offers multi-touch gestures, we are giving ISVs an opportunity to develop new applications. Many major computer companies have recently announced multi-touch technology, and our SDK will enable even more advances in what people are able to do with their computing devices.”
With its multi-touch gestures SDK, N-trig is setting the stage for ISVs to develop new and exciting technologies and encouraging them to develop applications for future platforms as well. N-trig is the only company that provides pen, touch, and multi-touch capabilities for tablet PCs, and its DuoSense digitizers support Microsoft’s Windows XP and Vista as well as future versions of Windows 7.
For more information, please visit http://www.n-trig.com/Content.aspx?Page=SupportSDK
HP intends to have a notebook with a touchscreen display on the market within the next 18 months, the company has told the Wall Street Journal. The company was one of the first to introduce a mainstream, touchscreen desktop in the TouchSmart series but now says that it sees enough interest in the format to be one of the first with a portable PC offering a heavily touch-driven interface. The company has already introduced a tablet PC for the mainstream through the tx series but still depends on a stylus inside a conventional interface and would like to change the interface to a more natural one for future devices.
“We see touch as the almost preferred method for nontechnical users,” says HP’s Personal Systems Group CTO Phil McKinney.
The company has already hinted these plans but has now set a timetable that would put the release of the future notebook design before 2010, confirming that HP will use a custom interface rather than wait for the release of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which will make touch input a standard feature.
Apple is believed to have helped spur this interest in touchscreen devices through the iPhone but itself has remained silent on a touch interface for its computers, choosing instead to use multi-touch trackpads with more complex gestures.
First came touchscreens. We all loved them on PDAs, and they found widespread use in vertical markets. For may years, they remained relatively unchanged, improving in accuracy, but essentially providing a very static user experience.
When Apple brought multitouch to the masses, it was heralded as one of the greatest innovations in years. Everyone is racing to catch Apple, and its ability to provide intuitive, simple user interfaces relying on touch. However, once you get over the gloss and shine, all Apple really did was build a very good interface… multitouch was only icing on the cake, but certainly not the secret ingredient.
The iPhone has only just recently celebrated its first birthday, but already the progress on the “next big thing” is racing ahead in full gear. Take a look at the following take on a “Minority Report” type interface… makes the iPhone look darn right antique!
The HP Touchsmart IQ500 is a new experience in computing and home entertainment. Instead of dragging your mouse around, you can directly interact with the computer screen.
You only need to plug in one power cable, leaving your desktop nice and tidy and making it look more like a television than a computer. You still have option to a regular mouse but don’t think you will want to use it after watching the video clip below.
The full potential of this computer will not be usable until the Windows 7 operating system is released. However this is still one amazing machine for those who are looking for a computer and home entertainment system rolled into one.
Due to me putting my back out yesterday I wasn’t able to unbox the TouchSmart last night so today I had some help and managed to get the unit unboxed. I IMG_0998recorded an unboxing / first impressions video but to be honest its not until I put it in the living room tonight and started using it that I realised how good the machine is. There is two areas to focus on: The all in one hardware which is packaged in a very sleep design and the HP TouchSmart software which is amazingly tactile and had the whole family eager to play with it
First a quick look at the spec:
* Intel Core 2 Duo T5850 * 4GB Ram * 64bit Windows Vista Home Premium * 465GB hard disk * DVD burner * TV Tuner * 22″ Touch Display * Wifi and Bluetooth * Webcam * Wireless keyboard and mouse * All in one design
The TouchSmart software is beautiful,it looks great, it responds to flicks and presses and I love how the faster you swipe the faster it goes. It can play music, videos, and display pictures, there is a touch based web browser, RSS reader and weather apps. This is something I can only really show off in the video but a measure of it’s success is that my wife said “wow can we keep it” rather than the normal “oh no not another box”. It invites you to touch and play with it. My plan was to buy a new Media Center machine and hide it away but I now can see me going for something like this and have it in the living room (still working as a server for my Extenders as well)
ASUS has touted the multi-touch trackpads of its Eee PCs, but every time I have gone to test the multi-touch controls on the pad I can’t do much more than zoom in on a picture by pinching the pad. I are happy to report that finally Eee PC users are able to do more with their fingers.
Its nothing like the N-Trig multi-touch drivers for the Dell XT, but ElanTech, the company responsible for the smartpad on the Eee PCs, has updated the drivers for the touchpad to enable more multi-touch gestures (you can find the drivers here). Thanks to JKKMobile for tipping us off on the new drivers.
I downloaded the drivers to the Eee PC 1000H running Windows Vista and they worked right away (they should work for XP as well; there is no Linux driver version). In the mouse properties window, an extra ElanTech tab allows for tweaking the different multi-touch gestures.
I was then able to create commands that go along with different gestures. For instance, I configured a two finger tap on the trackpad to launch Firefox. Swiping three fingers down will bring up an ALT+Tab command that allows for moving through windows. Swiping three fingers up will launch My Computer.
You can also do more in a photo gallery program. In Windows Photo Gallery, I was able to pinch to zoom, but also able to rotate the picture with a swipe. It is all very MacBook Air like.
I like the gestures the best in the browser. A three finger swipe will move forward or backward between Web pages and two fingers up and down will scroll through the page.
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