Although it would have been cool for at least once for Bill Gates to use a Tablet PC during one of his keynotes, he at least doesn’t fail to mention them. In his final keynote as full-time Microsoft chairman at TechEd, Gates talks of Tablets and education:
“I think of every student having a device that avoids the need for paper textbooks. The Tablet device will let them take notes, record audio, connect to the Internet. It’ll be superior in every way and yet it can’t be purely keyboard based. It has to have this touch and pen as well.”
In case you’re wondering, he didn’t say much more about Windows 7 other than referring to the multi-touch demoed last week at D. He did add:
“We’ve also got the pen capability, that we’re taking to a whole new level in terms of easy recognition and how that is implemented in the hardware.”
Not sure if he was referring to Windows 7 here what’s currently available in Vista. My guess is the latter, but it’s hard to tell.
I was glad he finally is mentioning vision in more detail. This has been a very lacking aspect of Microsoft’s interaction strategy if you ask me. Surface, TouchWall and the like are all beginning to use cameras, though there’s lots more than can and should be done. I’d like to see a whole new vision processing capabilities added to the .NET Framework.