Touch Screen Gadget

HP Pavilion Series leads the future pack

Posted by sawaru | Category: LCD Monitor, Laptop & Notebook, Multi Touch, Tablet PC & UMPC, Trend Watch & News

HP said it will be producing more products utilizing touchscreen technology.

HP’s first touch-screen enabled product included the Pavilion tx2500z tablet laptop,  TX1420US, Pavilion tx1000 and most recent TouchSmart All-in-one PC. The company said it will get more touchscreen notebooks out in the market within the next 18 months.

Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer for the company’s laptop-making Personal Systems Group said"We’re focused on recognizing the potential of touch now." He continues, "We see touch as the almost preferred method for non-technical users."

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HP usher touchscreen technology for masses

Posted by sawaru | Category: Desktop, LCD Monitor, Laptop & Notebook, Tablet PC & UMPC, Trend Watch & News

Hewlett-Packard Co. is hot on the prospects of touchscreen technology.

H-P says it’s working on an array of products, including notebooks, that use the same type of finger-tapping interface popularized by Apple Inc.’s iPhone. H-P’s so keen on the idea that it says it’s trying to get touch-enabled notebook computers on the market within the next 18 months.

H-P’s plans illustrate how the iPhone has whetted the world’s appetite for touchscreens, which have become increasingly available on handheld devices and are now making their way into the personal-computer sector. Several competitors already have touchscreen desktops, but few have laptops with touchscreens.

Market research suggests H-P is making a smart bet. The number of touchscreen devices, including PCs, should more than double to 800 million by 2013, according to industry tracker iSuppli. Spending on touchscreen components likely will reach $6.4 billion, up 33% from $4.8 billion, over the same period, iSuppli said.

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Microsoft Sphere a touchable orb

Posted by sawaru | Category: Table and Floor, Trend Watch & News

Microsoft Sphere which was featured at the vendor’s Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Wash., is still a research prototype. It uses a touch-screen orb instead of a traditional flat-screen monitor.
The system combines touch capabilities with a projector and an infrared camera, noted Hrvoje Benko, a Microsoft Research human-computer interaction specialist, in a blog post.
Microsoft engineers have so far developed a picture and video browser, as well as three applications for the system.
"It’s important in that someone is spending time and money to look at different ways to design and use computers," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc. "You never know where [it] might lead."

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Casino touch-screen bar table for flirting

Posted by sawaru | Category: Restaurant, Bistro & Shop, Table and Floor, Trend Watch & News

Microsoft Corp. and Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. introduced a high-tech interactive bar table Wednesday that lets patrons order drinks, watch YouTube videos, play touch-screen games and even flirt with each other.

The six rectangular tables with built-in 30-inch flat screens using Microsoft Surface technology were installed in a lounge at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, with custom applications built for Harrah’s.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the units sold for a base price of $10,000.

A program called Mixologists lets patrons play bartender by creating and ordering concoctions of whatever cocktails and mixers they click on. The system is able to remember users’ drink orders and, one day, may be able to offer customers the same drink at other Harrah’s locations, such as when they play a slot machine.

Another program lets users watch YouTube videos, either by searching or choosing from a list of popular videos. Harrah’s officials said they reached a licensing deal with YouTube on Wednesday. The table also includes a program called Flirt, which lets customers sitting at any such table in the lounge see and chat with each other, take and e-mail pictures and even trade cell phone numbers. Other programs let users play video games or get information about restaurants, shows, nightclubs and other Harrah’s attractions.

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Microsoft Zune playing pricey catch up

Posted by sawaru | Category: MP3 Player, Portable Media Player & Storage, Trend Watch & News

Microsoft is considered one of the more successful rivals to Apple but has historically lagged behind the iPod as it focuses on expanding its lineup to include the essentials rather than introducing a touchscreen player at the same time as the iPod touch in the fall of last year. The company launched a flash-based Zune roughly two years after Apple and this spring has just added TV shows, smart playlists, and other features present in earlier versions of Apple’s software.
Microsoft Entertainment and Devices chief Robbie Bach is less direct regarding the prospect of a Zune phone and first says that there are no plans to develop an in-house phone under the Zune label or a similar platform, but agrees with a consensus that an all-in-one device is inevitable. Establishing the Zune, its software, and an online store are part of a “broad investment” that will pay off later, he says. The official also notes that the company is “comfortable” with both hardware and software.

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Microsoft big touch wall

Posted by admin | Category: Table and Floor, Trend Watch & News

One of the things Bill Gates showed today at Microsoft’s annual CEO Summit was a Touch Wall, based on Windows Vista and Plex: “a 4×6 foot plexiglass screen, a rear projector, a infrared camera and the three infrared lasers”. CrunchGear got a demo, and says:

Microsoft is quick to say that they have no current plans to productize and sell TouchWall. But the potential of the system is obvious — Prately spoke animatedly about a future where the computing experience is less monitor/keyboard/mouse and more like an architect’s desk, with user input primarily directly on the screen and via voice commands, with keyboard/mouse type input used more for data entry or office type editing tasks.

It also works with, say, a cardboard screen. CrunchGear adds:

It’s also clear that the only real limit on the screen size is the projector, meaning that entire walls can easily be turned into a multi touch user interface. Scrap those white boards in the office, and make every flat surface into a touch display instead.

[guardian]

Windows Mobile 6.1 improvements

Posted by admin | Category: Smartphone, Windows Mobile

Microsoft recently introduced Windows Mobile 6.1, an upgrade of the Windows Mobile operating system.

It adds new features and capabilities to the previous (6.0) version, enhancing your Web browsing and day-to-day use of Windows Mobile. It also adds new features and capabilities of interest to the enterprise users. This article looks at some of the more important enhancements.

Improved Messaging

Microsoft has made some significant enhancements in the Messaging application. For enterprise users Microsoft added Exchange Auto-Discovery, which makes it easier to set up synchronization with Exchange. Users are now able to download e-mail from all accounts at the same time. Microsoft added auto-complete for e-mail recipients, which makes it easier for users to enter e-mail addresses on small keyboards and touch screens. Also, Windows Mobile 6.1 added the ability to select multiple e-mail items in the list so you can easily delete or move e-mail. Finally, Windows Mobile 6.1 includes optimizing the bandwidth utilization for Exchange, POP3, and IMAP4, which is very important to enterprise wireless data users.

 

Other enhancements to WM 6.1

A number of enhancements made to Windows Mobile 6.1 are of particular interest:

• Bluetooth headset auto-pairing: Makes it easier to pair your device with standard Bluetooth headsets.
• Bluetooth phone address profile: This enables the transfer of phone book information across phone-enabled Bluetooth devices.
• Network Time (NITZ) Description: Automatically updates the time on a device when it moves into a new time zone or receives a Daylight Savings Time (DST) change from the cellular network.
• Cut, Copy, and Paste capability added to Windows Mobile Standard (non-touch screen) smartphones.
• Enhanced "Getting Started CD" not only contains user-installable versions of Mobile Device Center and ActiveSync, it includes software that helps the user set up their device and an application that makes e-mail setup easier by exporting their Outlook settings from a desktop PC to the Windows Mobile device.

Managing Mobile Devices—System Center Mobile Device Manager

Last fall, Microsoft released a new server to manage Windows Mobile devices called System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM). SCMDM actually adds Windows Mobile Devices to Active Directory and provides group policy management of the device security as well as a separate VPN connection optimized for Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile 6.1 is required to support SCMDM. SCMDM is covered in detail in the Enterprise section on page 55.

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Cheap open-source,DIY Multitouch Display

Posted by admin | Category: Multi Touch, Table and Floor, Trend Watch & News

Engineers are building inexpensive, tabletop, touch-screen displays and sharing the instructions online.

The iPhone popularized the idea of multitouch displays, and just last month, Microsoft brought the concept to a larger screen by releasing Surface, a multitouch table with a hefty $10,000 price tag. But now engineers at Eyebeam, an art and technology center based in New York, have created a scaled-down open-source version of Surface, called Cubit. By sharing the Cubit’s hardware schematics and software source code, the engineers are significantly reducing the cost of owning a multitouch table. But they’re also fostering innovation by giving engineers an open platform on which to develop novel multitouch applications–something that they’ve previously lacked.

Addie Wagenknecht, a fellow at Eyebeam, designed Cubit in an attempt to "demystify multitouch." She and her collaborator Stefan Hechenberger "wanted to prove that anyone could build [a multitouch table] if they had a few simple things," she says. In addition to making Cubit software available online, Wagenknecht is selling various do-it-yourself kits that include parts and instructions, aimed at people with a range of engineering skills. Putting together a personal multitouch table could cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000, depending on the type of hardware used, Wagenknecht says.

Multitouch displays are not new technology; in fact, they’ve been built in research labs for decades. Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs created an iconic multitouch table called DiamondTouch; more recently, Jeff Han, founder of Perceptive Pixel, based in New York, developed wall-sized multitouch screens that he sells to corporations and major government agencies. But because of the falling costs of many touch-screen components, such as infrared light sources and small cameras and projectors, it’s now becoming feasible for people without access to a lab or venture-capital money to make their own multitouch displays.

Microsoft’s Surface has an image projector, infrared-light emitters, and five cameras nestled in its base. According to Kyle Warnick, a Microsoft marketing manager, both the projector and the infrared emitter shine onto the tabletop from underneath. When an object such as a finger or a cell phone is in contact with the surface, it reflects the infrared light in a characteristic way, and the reflection is picked up by the cameras below. Currently, Microsoft has no plans to open the hardware or software of the system to developers.

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CTIA Wireless 2008: All point to iPhone

Posted by admin | Category: Mobile Phone, Smartphone, Trend Watch & News, Windows Mobile

The specter of the iPhone hung over the 2007 spring CTIA Wireless show, casting a dark shadow of uncertainty over the whole event. Fast forward a year to this year’s conference. How things do and, to some extent, do not remain the same.

As expected, the iPhone’s been a huge hit, turning Apple not just into a huge smartphone player, but a significant force in the mobile phone industry period, all from scratch. And while, like last year, Apple did not have a booth, the iPhone’s impact on the wireless world reverberated throughout the show floor.

Unlike 2007, where trepidation over the iPhone’s impact seemed to rule the day, 2008 saw a significant shift in attitude regarding the iPhone. This year, we gathered from our time at the show that the iPhone is now seen by a significant portion of the cell phone industry as representing not just a threat but an opportunity.

Building awareness of capablities and making progress in improving the ease-of-use, access and integration to mobile content were some of the key themes running throughout CTIA this spring. That is, while there are plenty of data services available, most of them aren’t - save messaging - used as much as they could be, that easily, speedily (even with 3G networks), and - most frustrating of all to all stakeholders - on consumers’ radar.

For a lot folks in the industry, while they’ve been aware of these problems for years, the release of the iPhone is what got them out of their malaise and into taking more aggressive action.

So we had a number of vendors, even direct Apple competitors, speaking to us about how the iPhone’s drawn a lot of positive attention to the industry. It has also shown consumers some of things you can do with a cell phone and smartphone that they may not have been aware of before.

On the platform side, at CTIA, you had Microsoft come out with Windows Mobile 6.1, which features mostly usability enhancements, and, over the past year, Nokia adding touch screen support to S60. The first Nokia device with a touch screen, the Tube, started to make the rounds in throughout the Internet rumor mill shortly after CTIA ended.

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178M Touch Screen Phones to Ship by 2011

Posted by admin | Category: Mobile Phone, Multi Touch, Smartphone, Trend Watch & News

Attendees of last week’s CTIA Wireless event saw major mobile phone makers like Sony Ericcson, Samsung and LG all tout new touch-screen-based devices. By 2011, handset makers will ship some 178 million phones with touch screens according to new predictions from Multimedia Intelligence, a market research firm. Compare that to the "rounding error" touch devices represented in the context of the entire handset market in 207, in which 1.12 billion devices were shipped, and you see a very significant jump.

One major catalyst for this change: Nine months ago, Apple took the entire mobile industry by storm when it released the iPhone. Apple’s first smartphone, based on its innovative and easy to use touch screen user interface (UI), already has made the company the number three smartphone maker in the world based on sales, according to research company Canalys. And it only sells one device, compared to the dozens of devices sold by its rivals, like Nokia and Research In Motion, numbers one and two in the market, currently offer.

Though handsets with touch screens had been available for years from companies like Palm and HTC–Apple even offered a PDA called the Newton throughout the 1990s–none had combined touch screen tech that doesn’t require the use of a stylus with such a simple and innovative UI.

With the iPhone’s success in the market–Canalys says Apple sold some 2.3 million units through Q4 2007–came a huge consumer appetite for touch screen tech, and Apple’s competitors have been quick to try to meet that demand.

Before CTIA, HTC debuted devices like the T-Mobile Wing and Sprint Touch, both of which have touch screens. LG released the touch-based Voyager. Palm’s Pilot and Treo devices, which have been around for years, have all featured touch screens. GPS maker Garmin plans to release a touch-based smartphone. And even BlackBerry-maker RIM is rumored to be working on a touch screen device.

At last week’s show, Sony Ericcson showed off its Windows Mobile-based XPERIA device, which has both a touch screen and a slider keyboard, not unlike the one found on T-Mobile’s popular Sidekick device. Then Samsung surprised the crowds with an iPhone lookalike called the Instinct, which will be available soon from Sprint. And LG showed off the Vu device with its touch screen and AT&T mobile TV support.

And the growing trend won’t likely stop at handset makers. AT&T recently said it would soon staring using Microsoft’s Surface desktop PC, which is users control by touching its large surface touch screen.

Panasonic recently unveiled a digital camera with a touch screen UI

And iSuppli recently predicted that global shipment revenue for cutting-edge touch-screen technologies will rise to $4.4 billion by 2012, up from $2.4 billion in 2006.

[cio]

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