Where’s The Multi-Touch Love?

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.