In this interview with Brett McAnally, Dell's Director of Business Notebooks, we talk about the launch of the Latitude XT Tablet PC, choosing N-Trig as its digitizing partner, the potential for an Inspiron / Vostro type of Tablet, and more. Enjoy!

Brett, thank you for the opportunity to talk about Dell’s Latitude XT. It has been four months since the release of the Latitude XT. How has the response been in your target market?

We’re really pleased with the response so far.  Thankfully, the feedback has confirmed what we expected, that usability is really valued, whether it be in the form of small size/weight, bright panels and multiple input options- especially touch. We’re getting great tips on what is good and what needs work for next time – it’s a learning process and there’s lots to do as we want to improve, but at least we’re hearing that we’re off to a good start.

Dell's entry in to the Tablet PC space was a highly anticipated one. Being so late to the game, they needed something to set themselves apart from their competition. That differentiator is the N-Trig digitizer allowing for capacitive touch + ink with the promise for multi-touch.

So how did they do with the Latitude XT Tablet PC? In my opinion, it the best touch + pen experience on the market. It is smooth, soft, and accurate, allowing for a more intuitive user experience than currently available in passive or other dual-mode offerings.

In this InkShow, I focus on the pen and touch experience of the Latitude XT, demoing the various input modes, as well as comparing it to the Lenovo X61 Multi-Mode touch Tablet PC. Stay tuned for more upcoming InkShows on the Latitude XT where I cover the various features more indepth, the software, accessories, and more.

• Download the high res version here (30:29, 225 mb )
• Watch the embedded version below
• Watch the Unboxing here.
• Visit Dell.com for more info
• Visit N-Trig.com

All GBM InkShows and Podcasts are sponsored by TechSmith.

Another feature in which the Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC shows off it edge is with this nifty little feature: Resume On Pen Removal

It works quite simple: when in Stand-By or Hibernate mode, ejecting the pen will wake the system up. I like Dell's approach a lot: they put the focus on the pen. That may not sound like a big deal, but it is a subtle shift in thinking about how to approach interaction with a Tablet PC.

N-Trig's Auto-Mode implementation follows the same design philosophy on the XT: to begin using touch, just touch the screen twice, and touch will activate. To begin writing again, just bring the pen to the screen, and the pen will take over again It is instinctive and natural. No hardware button pushes to get in the way of how you interact with the Tablet PC.

Another area in which Dell thought about user experience was the scroll wheel on the side of the screen. It is the perfect location for scrolling pages while in portrait mode.

I really appreciate companies who approach design like that. It means they "get" Tablet and are focused on the whole experience of pen, touch, writing, launching applications, scrolling, and more.

Stay tuned later this week for a series of InkShows on the Latitude XT, as I delve into these areas and more.

So, I've been talking with a Dell representative this morning on this Latitude XT / N-Trig gridding issue.

Dell confirmed to me that it is a result of the capacitive touch digitizer technology; and, the grid is viewable when off, dim, viewed at different angles, and sometimes under fluorescent lighting. When operating under normal brightness settings, though, it is not easily viewable (I agree). Apparently, it is even less viewable with the LED screen. As Steve eloquently pointed out and Dell confirmed, it is a trade off of having the capacitive touch technology, and is a design issue.

The Dell rep told me that they ultimately want me to be happy with the technology purchase; and if I'm not happy, then they would work out whatever they needed to do: trade in for the LED model or do a refund. In addition, I have up to a month to decide. You don't see that being offered very much in this industry.

Thanks to Dell's generous return policy, I'm going to push through and see if I can get to the point of it being a non-issue. I may ultimately go the LED route since the grid is apparently less visible.

In the end, I need to decide if the XT and the superior capacitive touch experience is worth the intermittent visual disruption. Thankfully, I have some time to decide. I'll keep everyone up to date on my progress.

Hopefully, this whole process will help our readers work through the known issues of the XT before deciding for themselves if the XT is for them.

Yesterday, I posted about my disappointment with the grid issue on my Latitude XT Tablet PC. Steve Seto, a Tablet PC MVP and frequent GBM Contributing Writer, has penned this counter-point article on the whole gridding issue. His insights are quite helpful given that he is also a Latitude XT owner. He offers another view point in bringing some good balance to this issue.

- Steve Seto

Rob has raised the issue of visible “gridding” on the screen of the Dell Latitude XT. It bothers him a lot. By contrast, it doesn’t bother me at all, and I thought that another perspective about this might be helpful to our community.

I want to begin by saying that I have nothing to do with N-trig or Dell and I wouldn’t recognize Len Englehardt if I bumped into him at the mall. What I bring to this discussion is almost 40 years of engineering experience, some significant part of which was devoted to conductive coatings on transparencies. For this reason, I think I understand some of what N-trig had to cope with when they designed their DuoSense digitizer. However, this discussion is based solely on my experience.

To be as brief as possible, there are at least a few technologies that one could consider if one wanted to make a pen- and touch-sensitive screen. Some of them would allow you to have a completely clear LCD screen (for example, think of a lattice-work of infrared beams immediately above the surface of the screen), but may have failings that make them unsuitable for mobile tablet use; too bulky, too heavy, overcome by sunlight, too energy-hungry… I could go on.

So the set of practical technologies that one has to choose from are somewhat more limited. One obvious approach is to integrate a sensing grid into the tablet display. If you want touch, that sensing grid probably needs to go over the front of the screen… and that means the design needs to consider relative transparency. How are you going to see through the sensing grid to see the LCD screen beneath?

Well, you can use a grid of very fine wires. Some bank ATM touch screens use this approach. But the wires are relatively easy to see and probably wouldn’t be acceptable to folks like us. Instead of wires, how about a conductive coating that’s transparent? You can do that, too! But the practical materials that are available, such as gold, enhanced gold and indium-tin oxide (ITO), all involve various compromises. First, none of them are truly transparent; just relatively transparent. Second, each of them introduces some degree of color change to the transmitted (and reflected) light. Gold, for example imparts a vague green tinge to transmitted light. And then there are a bunch of other issues like durability and compatibility that we’ll skip over. The point is, there are compromises involved in the technologies that we all love.

The bottom line is that if you choose a technical approach as described above, it is unrealistic to expect that it will be completely invisible. The best you can do is to make the visual issues as minimal as you can. I think that’s what Dell and N-trig have attempted to do, and I think they’ve been pretty successful. The gridding on the XT is visible. But the user can adjust the screen brightness to minimize this visibility, and that’s a reasonable design compromise. In the meantime, technology will continue to move on, and maybe Wacom or someone will figure out a better way, but for now N-trig is here and real and from an engineer’s point of view, I think they have done a good job.

Of course, beauty is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. This screen grid issue is simply one more factor that you should consider if you are interested in products that incorporate the DuoSense digitizer.

I posted up our N-Trig interview on Thursday and wanted to pass along my own thoughts on what N-Trig's Mr. Lenny Englehardt had to say. Since I had the opportunity to speak with Mr.  Englehardt, I had the benefit of hearing repeated comments, voice inflection, and coming away with an overall impression. I think the question / answer summary I posted captures the essence of the interview quite well. Overall, I came away with the impression that N-Trig is very frustrated with Microsoft in terms of marketing ( or lack thereof ) and not talking about its superior multi-touch solutions ( (N-Trig's ), palm rejection technology as implemented in Vista, is not that impressed with Vista, and is quite thankful that Apple is generating and talking about their great multi touch products. N-Trig has become quite the beneficiary of Apple's successes.

More detail:

• I think it is a good sign that N-Trig sees a market need for capacitive touch and pen in the 7 - 8.9" small form factor. He knows a lot about what OEMs are doing, and his statement is a good sign
• A focus on the 7" to 17" market for laptops has huge implications for bringing ink and multi-touch to more folks.
• When asked about Vista and the iPhone, I found Mr. Englehardt's replies quite telling and wonder how common his feelings are with other manufactures building Microsoft-based solutions - Redmond marketing nowhere to be seen, wishing Microsoft would do more to point out that what Apple is doing on the touchpad, N-Trig and Microsoft is doing to the screen; and thanking Apple for generating great multi-touch products ( notice he didn't thank Microsoft ):

Great steps for pen and touch, not enough traction in their own software apps like Outlook, PowerPoint etc.. Vista as an OS is not a very user friendly product, way too many crashes, hangs etc. They don’t seem to be keen to scrub it and flush out all the issues. If they would push ink in their own apps and to ISV’s it would be great. The average consumer and enterprise user still doesn’t  know that Microsoft has touch and ink capabilities built into Vista, while everyone knows how the iPhone and MacBook Air work. Redmond marketing is nowhere to be seen.

also....

As mentioned above, we thank Apple for the efforts in generating great multi touch products. We wish Microsoft would do more and point out that what Apple is doing on the touch pad, we are doing on the screen.

• I also found his above statements on Vista to be quite the indictment, especially for a company working so closely with the inner workings of Vista.
• Mr. Englehardt is quite frustrated with Microsoft and their palm rejection technology in Vista, saying "Our expectation was that Microsoft would do more with handling dual-mode, and basically ignore all inputs when writing" and "We will work to improve palm rejection in dual-mode regardless of what Microsoft has in store for future versions of Windows.  We are enhancing palm rejection on our own, independent of Microsoft. Improvements will be ready sooner than one might expect..stay tuned."  Wow.....
• As someone working closely with human interaction technologies, he doesn't see the market need for a UMPC, especially when someone has a good phone and a Tablet PC. I've seen the same thing in my own experience: a Tablet PC plus the iPhone is providing me with everything I need. If I only had a desktop, though, the UMPC would be a good solution. As more people are moving to mobile computers, is the UMPC getting squeezed out? Is this where we will see the phone technology ( like the iPhone ) continue to improve, thus negate the real need for UMPC? The iPhone, for me, has the been the Origami device originally described by Microsoft - a device that I go back in to the house to get.
• Pen only or touch only solutions is not their playing field. It is the combination of pen and touch that N-Trig is focusing on, and that is a good thing for the Tablet PC space.

Last month, I had the opportunity to speak with Lenny Englehardt,  N-Trig's Vice President of Business Development. We talked about a number of issues on the mind of GBM readers, and as you'll see, Mr. Englehardt was not the least bit shy in sharing his opinion on number of topics like small form factor devices, Microsoft, and Apple.

We had such a good conversation that we're planning a special podcast to discuss these items in more depth, as well as follow-up with some more reader questions. Follow the Read More link for the complete interview.

Most folks know that Apple added multi-touch touchpads to their MacBook Pro line earlier this week, which prompted Loren Heiny to ask the following question:

Let me see. How many “tech-leading” Tablet PCs have multi-touch? Oh, yeah. None.

This is getting old. Where is the defibrillator for the Tablet PC industry?

Good question, Loren.  We do know that Dell's XT will support multi-touch when N-Trig releases the update, although we don't know Dell will release it for current XT's. Beyond that, I have to agree with Loren: where's the defibrillator? If there was ever a platform  poised to bring true multi-touch, it was the tablet pc, and again, we see Apple taking the lead.  I originally dismissed Apple's multi-touch touchpad approach as un-natural, but after demoing a MacBook Air last week, I came away quite impressed with how natural it felt. On a related Apple multi-touch issue, check out this patent request for a next generation "multi-touch input surface" which aims to replace traditional input devices like tablet, mouse, and keyboard.

Back to Tablet PCs - hardware support is just one of the issues. We still need OS and software support for multi-touch to truly work and be functional, which presents more delays.  

By the way, my St. Louis trip has delayed my publishing the N-Trig interview. I'm still working on it, getting more questions / answers from N-Trig, etc.

N-Trig, makers of the DuoSense technology that we are now seeing in Dell’s new XT Tablet PC and have seen in previous Motion Computing Tablets, just received venture capital investment funding to the tune of $28 million from Canaan Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners, and current investors. Maybe this will speed some of that multi-touch capacitive action along.

Here’s a link to the press release.

Via Alan Weinkrantz.

I'm interviewing Lenny Englehardt, N-Trig's Vice President of Business Development, on Monday, February 11th. This is an interview I'm very excited about.

I've got a list of topics to cover with Lenny, but we thought it would be good to get some questions from the folks that matter - you! What would you like to know about N-Trig?Got any tough, hard-nosed questions you want to press them on? Are you curious about where their focus is right now and what the future might hold? What about their relationship with Dell, Motion and other OEMs?

Post your questions as a comment to this article, and I'll be sure they get asked. In addition, since Lenny is VP of Business Development, they'd like to know your ideas and concepts for mobile platforms where N-Trig technology could be used. Think outside the box, and submit your ideas as a comment. Who knows, you just might spur them on to the next big thing!

Look for the interview, along with your questions and answers, to be posted later next week.

The entire GottaBeMobile.com team got the opportunity to sit down with InPlay Technologies at CES to catch up on the new technologies. Let's get this out of the way first. Yes, InPlay Technologies made the troubled FinePoint digitizer. However, a lot has changed since that time - management, engineering, and the manufacturer they use to produce their products. They claim to have addressed the quality control issues that plagued the FinePoint digitizers on the early Gateway models. I hope they have, because the new InPlay Technologies MagicPoint line of digitizers is pretty impressive technically, and I want them to get a chance.

Digital versus Analog Input

I just received word from N-Trig that on Wednesday they will be announcing enhancements to their DuoSense single capacitive touch to include multitouch capabilities. The word from N-Trig is that this will be available for OEM integration in May 2008. This is will be a software / firmware upgrade to Tablets with N-Trig digitizers. I asked N-Trig about support for current Dell XT Latitudes, and they told me that it will be up to OEMs to decide how to distribute the software upgrade to support this new multitouch enhancement. It is not currently in the XT Latitudes. Given the pricing of the XT, I'd expect Dell to offer this as a free firmware upgrade.

They have released a YouTube video demonstrating this new capability ahead of the press release:

I guess N-Trig doesn't get to be alone in the spotlight anymore. InPlay Technologies, makes of the FinePoint digitizers, have just announced an integrated active pen and multi-finger capacitive touch input system. That sounds like a very direct competitor to the N-Trig systems shipping in the Dell Latitude XT. Unlike the N-Trig, this still appears to be a two part solution - a capacitive touch solution combined with the Finepoint - but the press release is less than clear on that point. Either way, though, I don't think users will care to much as long as the solution works well and gives them the experience they want. One thing that InPlay appears to be adding to the mix is that their FinePoint pens support tilt, something that isn't currently supported on any Tablet PCs that I know of.

I'm excited to see a new entrant into what is obviously an emerging market. Given the price premium that Dell is attempting to charge on the Latitude XT, I have to think that the N-Trig solution is not cheap. Maybe with some competition the prices will get driven down a bit faster and we can see some more affordable capacitive touch systems.

With Dell’s announcment of their XT Tablet PC that includes an N-Trig digitizer, N-Trig is all over the news this week. Sierra recently posted some great links to videos of the digitizer in action here.

Now Gizmodo is running an exclusive interview with N-Trig’s Director of Marketing, Abigal Solomon, where she gives out the info that N-Trig has its focus far beyond Tablet PCs. The interview also covers some of the digitizer’s features and some interesting comparisions to Wacom’s digitizers. N-Trig is calling their technology Duo-Sense, which might do something to help clear up the whole “What is multi-touch?” issue that’s out there.

Direct2Dell.com just posted a new video demonstrating the capacitive pen and touch on the Latitude XT Tablet PC. The video features N-Trig's Rick Seger and Dell's Bob Sparks.

Thanks for the links, Alan!

Apparently N-Trig has decided to get people a little more excited about N-Trig digitizers. In addition to the previous tech video, N-Trig has just posted two more videos.

N-trig Introduces DuoSense™ for Tablet PCs

N-trig - Ease of Use & Mobility when using a Tablet PC

N-trig - The Capabilities and Features of DuoSense™ for Tablet PCs

If you're considering whether to drop the money on a new Dell Latitude XT, maybe these videos will help you to decide.

N-trig just posted a new video on YouTube covering some interesting details on how the N-trig digitizer works. This is the technology behind the new Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC we covered earlier. If you're interested in how it works, check this out. He even uses a Dell in the video as an example convertible, and it looks like a Motion LE1700 as an example slate.

We've been checking on N-trig's website for quite a while now and today that paid off...  It looks like Dell might have been shipped some of their screens for the Latitude XT that is coming out soon - at least we hope soon.  I'm not sure of the production process, or how many were shipped before the last month or so, but if 10,000 digitizers have been shipped out, my bet would be some of them are going into some empty Dell bezels soon...  The press release also says that they are expecting to ship over 50,000 digitizers per month by Q2/2008.  It will be interesting to see how these stack up to the WACOM screens.

Well, just when you think you have seen it all...  Thoughtfix comes up and trumps it! What is it??  He calls it a 2NITS - Two Nokia Tablets and an iPod Touch.  This is what is in the car:

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet running Carman

Nokia N800 Internet Tablet running Navicore

iPod touch playing music

Motorola Q

Harman Kardon Drive+Play (attached to the iPod mini in the glove compartment - not used for the video)

And I thought I was cool and innovative with my Asus R2H mounted in the dash for a GPS device...  Check out the video below! Also, check out his site for a link to some photos of the mod.

We've been following N-Trig since the announcement of Motion Computing's LE1700 WriteTouch and their partnership with Dell on the XT Tablet PC.

Word comes today that they have officially opened shop in the good ole U.S.A. I'm really looking forward to hearing much more out of N-Trig over the years as they work to bring better dual-mode and multi-touch experiences to tablet pcs and ultra-mobile pcs.