Touch Screens on Laptops

Windows 7 is out and has built in support for touch screens. Tablets are undoubtedly a focus, but several commercials (and demonstrations for the past year or two) are pushing the technology for laptops and "all-in-one" desktops.

I've seen a number of demos of the all-in-ones with touch screens. Most of them use photo rotating for the demo which looks good but really isn't something that's going to sell me on a new computer or technology. I can't see spending a lot of time photo editting on this type of machine.

With a laptop my hands are closer to the screen, so reaching up to touch it, especially with one hand, seems like a pretty natural movement. I could see using the touchscreen to move windows on the screen (think expose), shrink and expand text or pictures, flick through a stack like coverflow or down a list like the contacts in an iPhone, or even pull up a menu and scan through it. I find reaching with one hand is quite a bit easier than reaching with two, so the multi-touch photo rotation is probably not a good bet.

Apple has multi-touch track pads which offer many advantages without requiring the user to touch the screen, but there is definitely room for innovation using the touch screen.

The key will be to get people used to it by introducing a small set of features that work well and offer a distinct advantage over using the keyboard, mouse, scrollwheel, trackpad, or other interface. Since a lot of laptops are used without a mouse the focus could be on supporting functions like click and drag which are tricky with a trackpad.

Recognizing that desktop, laptop, and tablet are different use cases is paramount. In the past Microsoft has struggled with that - Windows CE and Windows Mobile were essentially desktop Windows using a stylus which clearly was not the way to go.

I'm excited to see the willingness to expand the feature set, and hopeful we'll see improvements in usability and accuracy from it.