What does research analyst Michael Gartenberg think of Windows 7’s touch?
In Engadget yesterday he says:
“First, you need a touch-enabled PC, which you probably don’t have. Even then, the native touch features just aren’t worth an upgrade on their own. TouchPack (which is cleverly branded as Surface apps) is nothing more than a tech demo. Give me a PC OS optimized for touch across the board and I’m all there, but this is just a gimmick.”
Ouch.
But I don’t think he’s wrong in this. If you look at what’s available for multi-touch–in terms of the hardware, not just the software–you’ll see a lack of inspiration acrsoss the board.
Rob Bushway has been pointing this out daily on Twitter with regards to the Dell XT multi-touch drivers–or should I say lack thereof:
Yep, for all the talk and showcasing of touch in Windows 7, there’s really not that much available–not yet anyway.
The Kindle app for Windows 7 looks promising (it’ll be available soon), but let’s be serious, it’s really not much more than two point touch and smooth scrolling.
Nope. Touch isn’t a first class citizen in the Windows world at this time. It’s not on par with iPhone’s touch, for instance.
What’s the deal? I blame most of the problem on those silly PDA-style resistive touch interfaces. Sure, they were low cost, but they didn’t offer more. No smooth scrolling. No smooth windows repositioning. No smooth windows resizing. (Hey, you can’t even resize a non-fullsize window easily with multi-touch on Windows 7.)
But you know what? For all the whining I’m doing right now, I’m still quite optimistic about the future–particularly for eBook Readers. Yep, that’s where I see touch really taking off. It’s a great match. Full screen apps. The need for zooming in and out. The need for an onscreen keyboard. The need for selection and copy/paste. It goes on and on.
So I’m not so convinced it’s time to give up on touch quite yet with regards to Microsoft. For us developers, I encourage everyone to hang in there. The time is close. I can almost touch it. 🙂
Now if we could just get N-Trig and Dell to release a multi-touch driver that we could use…..
I agree with Michael’s statements, they mirror what I have been saying for a while.
I should point out that the Lenovo ThinkPad x200 tablet pc with multitouch has had Win 7 drivers for 2 months now. Dell is asleep at the wheel, Lenovo is all over it.