TouchSmarter: Touch Screen Gadgets

How to do you perceive your home in 2013? Do you want all the devices in your home to run with your voice common and simply want to navigate through using your hands? Then you can surely dream about it because human touch and natural user interface is something that companies are seeing their future in. Some laptops and handheld devices already use biometric finger scans to access stored data and can easily recognize the human touch as input device. Well, these things might come into other device within your home too making your life much easier than ever before.

Microsoft Surface Blog & Discussion Forum (Unofficial). Interacting with MultiTouch Input Devices and More..

Dubai: Major mobile phone vendors are set to cash in on the growing demand for multi-touch handset technology in the Middle East and are expected to boost their product line-up catalysed by Apple’s highly successful iPhone.

Research firm iSuppli forecasts global market for touch-screen panels to grow to 341 million units and earn $3.4 billion in value this year.

“In a market dominated by so-called resistive touch technology, Apple’s iPhone uses a different technology called projected capacitance that enabled the multi-touch functionality that had been lacking in resistive-based touch panels,” Jennifer Colegrove, senior analyst for emerging displays at iSuppli, said.

Gulfnews: Mideast to witness big demand for touch-screen mobile phones.

What better way to do market research than to ask students for their input on what they consider are important aspects of computers. Lenovo employed two interns over the summer who were very familiar with tabletPC’s and education. They created a head-to-head video comparison between their HP tablet and the Lenovo X61t. Being a tabletPC user in the education space myself, I have to agree with everything they say. There are parts where it does sound like a propaganda video for Lenovo but the students’ comments reflect real-world accounts of what OEM’s need to keep in mind when designing their next crop of tablets.

GottaBeMobile - Students Discuss Basic Needs For Tablets : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

Back in June, Aiptek announced their diminutive PocketCinema V10 projector at Computex. Using 3M’s LED projector technology, the PocketCinema V10 was able to project a 50-inch image at 640×480 resolution.

GottaBeMobile - Tiny Projector Showing Huge Promise : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums.

While not being touch related, this is still a great piece of kit… imagine the day that devices like these are built into iPhones, and in addition to projecting images, they could detect when you interact with those images. The future looks bright.

Trendhunter Magazine has compiled a list of the top interactive touch surfaces.

For those of you new to the world of multi-touch, a list like this gives you a pretty good recap of where this new technology is taking us.

Wow, has it really been 100 days since Apple turned the world upside down with their iPhone? Here is a nice recap of what the device is like after these 100 days.

…Has got to be the web browsing experience with Safari. I had the opportunity to play around with a colleagues iPhone last week. The device is great, as has been echoed here and elsewhere repeatedly. What struck me the most was web browsing (admittedly over wifi). Not only was the software well designed, much better than I have seen on a mobile device before, but it was FAST. Compared to an HTC 6700 or P4000 (using the same wifi network), the render time on the iPhone is amazing. While the multi touch is a great UI tool, without a solid product/software behind it, the tool is not worth much. And that is where the Apple iPhone shines, it really does work superbly well.

Chris, over at Information Rain, shares his thoughts on why Apple should bring multi touch to the desktop/laptop.

The sketched drawing above is Chris’, and he makes some compelling arguments, while acknowledging some of the challenges of a desktop multi touch PC. Interestingly enough, he virtually describes the HP TouchSmart as the ideal design for a multi touch PC. Maybe HP will get the hint and upgrade the TouchSmart to enable multi touch.

This is an angle we certainly would not have thought about. Ben thinks the TouchSmart PC may be a good system to rig up on boats. Apparently, the size becomes a bit of an advantage to ensure a secure mount. He also points out that being a touch screen without need of a special stylus trumps most tablet systems on he market for ease of use and convenience.

I wish him the best with it, although, like some of his commentors state, a Panasonic Toughbook solution may be more suited to some of the harsh conditions found aboard the seas.

Chad Sapieha has a write up/review of his family’s experiences with the HP TouchSmart over the course of a week. By and large, it seems that his family quite liked it. In a rather unique twist, it seems like the TouchSmart can be used to increase a couples sex life, although that is just speculation on our part.