Archive for October, 2008

I keep getting asked about iPhone style multi-touch features on Tablet PCs. I personally love the idea of multi-touch. I think that after 27 years of the PC mouse, it’s high time that we graduated from a single point interface.

Current Tablet PC hardware does not support multi-touch in the iPhone sense. There are a number of Tablet PCs that support both Pen and Touch input, but only via one point at a time.

Does multi-touch make you think of scene in the Minority Report with Tom Cruise? An interface like that would have all sorts of un-dreamed of practical applications. Most technically inclined folks are aware of the experiments of the Microsoft Surface team. They have been demonstrating prototypes of this Minority Report style interface for a while now, so we know that this will ultimately become a reality.

The good news is that multi-point/multi-touch will probably reach the Tablet PC before it hits your desktop (or window, or wall for that matter). In fact the video below by a company called JazzMutant is a Tablet PC hardware demonstration on Windows XP that was posted to Youtube last year.

The demonstration uses both Pen and touch input, and it’s quite smart about giving the pen precedence over touch. That will make for an awesome input system.

I would hope that we will see hardware like this on the next generation of Tablet PCs in 12-18 months.

You may remember that we wrote about the HP Tx2000 / Tx2500 “entertainment” Tablet PC earlier in the year. It included a couple of really great features like:

• AMD 64 bit processor
• Inbuilt DVD Burner
• Active digitiser pen.

HP Tx1000, the original model in this series left a lot to be desired. It was a touch screen only model. That was unfortunate because I’ve met dozens of people who bought the Tx1000 because they always wanted to try a Tablet PC and the Tx1000 was cheap.

Many of them were put off the Tablet PC experience altogether because of the touch screen.

With a touch screen it is very easy to accidentally confuse the PC. For example, when you’re writing it is natural to lean your wrist on the writing surface. A touch screen sees that as multiple points of contact and it get’s confused.

So a touch screen is not ideal for writing tasks, particularly when there is twelve inches of screen to connect with. People who bought the Tx1000 were very generally disappointed because of this.

Fortunately, HP listened and included an active digitiser in the Tx2000 and Tx2500 (They’ve been doing that a bit lately, listening). Tx2500 is a good improvement on the Tx1000 series and it is also still a cheap way to get into a Tablet PC.

That said, the Tx2500 “Entertainment Notebook” fits into the home notebook range. It’s not really ideal for full on business use and it’s certainly not rugged.

We’ve finally added the HP Pavilion Tx2500 to our online shop here.