Word: touch
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...gimme: the iPhone, Apple's brilliant deconstruction of the common cell phone, due out June 29. The other is a product mysteriously code-named Milan, from a new branch of Microsoft called, not much less mysteriously, surface computing. What the two have in common is a very advanced touch screen...
...been conditioned to hate touch screens; we've all spent way too much time timidly caressing tiny laptop trackpads and jabbing fingers at the grubby, unresponsive touch screens on ATMs. But the iPhone's screen is another animal altogether. It's extremely sensitive, like a trackpad, but not oversensitive. There's software in there designed to filter out inadvertent touches, interpret gestures and anticipate what you're groping for. Unlike a trackpad, which goes berserk if you try to touch it in two places at once, the iPhone's touch screen can handle multiple touches. After you take a photo...
...graphical-user interface--the GUI, in the parlance, pronounced "gooey"--a step further and makes it a tactile user interface. You're viewing a little world where data are objects, and instead of just pressing your nose up against the glass, you can reach in and pinch and touch those bits and bytes with your hands. The word is made flesh. Any realer and it would be Tron...
Lest you think this is more Steve Jobs magic, the core technology behind the iPhone's touch screen probably wasn't developed at Apple. Rumors swirl around a company called Fingerworks, founded by two University of Delaware professors, that Apple acquired in 2005. This doesn't reflect a weakness in Apple's R&D but rather one of the company's strengths, its ability to ingest other companies and seamlessly incorporate their innovations into its own. People slam Apple as an arrogant organization, but it doesn't have the not-invented-here issues of, say, Sony...
Imagine an iPhone the size of a coffee table, and you'll have some idea of what Microsoft has been working on for the past five years. Milan is, in fact, a table, with a large touch screen for a tabletop; the format will remind the nostalgic among you of the old cocktail-style arcade games. Like the iPhone, Milan's screen can accommodate multiple touches at once. My first reaction was that I was looking at a patent death match in the making, but the underlying mechanisms turn out to be very different: Milan uses a system of infrared...