Adding multi-touch to PC screens without reinventing the form factor is one of those visions of the future that our grandchildren will chuckle about. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw from 1900, depicting a classroom of the year 2000. Presciently, the students had access to any book ever printed—there was a huge machine with a tube that spit out the requested book.
Multi-touch will almost certainly work its way into larger-than-iPhone form factors. But just as certainly, they will have to be different than the ones we're used to.
I think a laptop would work with the bottom half (Where there is currently a keyboard + trackpad), as a second LCD which is touch sensitive.
The default arangement could be to simply have a keyboard displayed on the bottom half, with a trackpad area, but then with other apps you might want to manipulate graphics, or paint, or do other cool stuff on that bottom area.
It'd take a little while to get used to non moving keys, but typing on the iPhone is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and I'm sure there are technologies that could give some sort of little feedback to the fingers.
(This sounds quite like an enlarged Nintendo DS really).
That way also, you get one clean LCD, and a separate one that gets a little dirty from fingers, and has to be cleaned. Seems a good plan to me.
Another possibility would be to have a smaller area, like a touch pad, that corresponded to the screen. Wouldn't be great for detail work, but would save space and cost and I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to get used to doing multitouch stuff on it.
I believe apple has something similar to this in the case that they have a multi-touch track pad which can recognize some multi-touch commands. I'm not sure to what extent you can use it for though. (of course, macs still have the keyboard.)
I went out with some friends weeks ago. I found several girls were using blackberry and I asked them how do they like it and had they tried iPhone.
A girl told me she tried and she just couldn't use the multitouch on iPhone. I looked at her beautifully polished nails then I understood we really need hot female engineers in a consumer product team. Not for gender balance but just we can discover that current multi touch interface just won't go with fake nails.
I wonder why people work in the big compound beside Lake Samammish never found the problem. I live in NYC so we have more sex and the city women here. But I've been Seattle, even more men there but how come they've never discover this problem in their QA team?
-- edit --
To be fair to MS, the fake nails don't go with multi touch happens only in iphone's form factor, because the key is very small, but on common touchpad and keyboards, fake nails doesn't hamper finger tip to touch the keyboard.
Here we are TWO+ years out from Windows 7 and you already have bloggers and various websites bashing it.
MS will never win.
How about this, just by reading the headline "Windows 7? We already hate it." I chose not to read the article because I knew it would contain useless/troll-like/flame bait. How's that for jumping to conclusions?
I think multitouch is a decent thing to put into an OS if only as a stepping stone to later form factors. Sure, it isn't so hot now, but you can at least give hardware manufacturers reason to look at making computers that can leverage the feature more effectively. Trains need track, and tracks are only good for trains, but ya gotta start someplace.
It strikes me that this is the kind of feature that you can safely ignore if you don't want to use it. I suspect that touch surfaces will increase in popularity over the next few years, at least amongst certain user groups and having the OS accommodate these devices can only be a good thing. It's not as if you will be required to use it.
Don't like the touch features? Don't use them. It's not like the OS won't work just fine with a keyboard and mouse. Not liking Windows 7 because of a feature you won't even use is like me not liking Office because I only use Word and Excel but not Access. Windows 7 won't force you to use that feature any more than using Word and Excel forces me to use Access.
And on a slightly separate note, I'm pretty curious to see how this actually works. I use a multi-monitor setup, as I'm sure a lot of developers do, and I'm curious to see what it would be like to, for example, use my left index finger to quickly flick windows out of the way while using the mouse for specific activity. Or even just doing some basic stuff with touching with both hands to reduce the repetitive use of the right hand on the mouse all the time. I'm more than willing to give this a chance.
It took me ages to use the scroll wheel in my mouse instead of pointing-and-clicking on scrollbars, but once I did, I couldn't believe I waited so long to get into the habit.
A lot of people probably thought the mouse was a dumb idea when they were just using DOS. I doubt many of them would give up the mouse now. The uses for touch may not be obvious now, but once it's available, you may see very novel uses for it that people aren't thinking about now because it's not a standard feature. Just give it a chance. No one is ever going to force you to use it (just like you can still use a graphical OS without using a mouse if you really want to).
Please shut up about Windows 7. That's so far into the future that any discussion of its features and capabilities is entirely meaningless.
As for Windows 7, please go implement things that are interesting and elegant and useful and desirable, and -- when your set of features is mostly baked and mostly ready to ship -- then and only then tell me about it.
Finger-smudge-covered displays and tablets are useful, but far from cool or original.
Sure, do copy the cool stuff from other platforms. We know you want to. But you better have some fresh new tools and toys; the new features and tools that make me or any other customer want to drool over and buy and use your platform.
And for those few moments while you're not busy working on Windows 7 coolness and getting set to rock my world, how about fixing the mess that is the Vista ecosystem?
Using a Windows PC is somewhere between unpleasant and frustrating. This due to the mess that is modern PC design, adware, malware, bloatware, buggy software, proprietary formats and the rest of the stack. Make some room for your partners, too.
Oh, and this little Vista mishap will arrive fully fixed and solid and ready for production in Windows 7, too, right?
I agree that I wouldn't want be touching my laptop / desktop screen. But, assuming that the cost of of LCD glass continues to drop as a reasonable rate, I could see the custom-building crowd using it to make their own Surface-like tabletop computers. At least that's what I would do.
Multi-touch will almost certainly work its way into larger-than-iPhone form factors. But just as certainly, they will have to be different than the ones we're used to.