Touch Screen Desktop Monitors

Posted by | Cheap Desktop Computers | Friday 26 June 2009 6:05 pm

Touch Screen Desktop Monitors

Touch screen software, is probably going to get a lot more interesting once the software developers start using their imagination to cook up applications for users of multitouch desktop monitor screens. If you've ever watched a TV anchor "conducting" the news in front of a Magic Wall, you get some idea of the potential. HP, has been demonstrating a program that lets you paint on the screen of a TouchSmart desktop monitor using artist's brushes.

Microsoft (MSFT) has been a bit slow in realizing the potential of touch technology. They spent several years promoting touch for a type of notebook called the Tablet PC, requiring the use of a special pen. These work fine if you are taking handwritten notes or filling out forms, but desktop touch works better for the more complicated tasks. The display on even hefty laptops tends to be too small and positioned too low and close to make using touch technology comfortable. Notebooks tend to tip over backwards if you press on the screen. What's more, the technology needed in laptops that would sense complex gestures and allow the use of fingers instead of a pen is very expensive, even more so in larger sizes.

Instead of using the screen itself to detect touch, both the TouchSmart and Studio One PCs from Dell use an array of cameras built into the frame around the screen to detect hand movements. This optical touch-sensing technology comes from a New Zealand company called NextWindow. The same relatively inexpensive technology, when compared to the physically touching a desktop monitor screen and adds around $25 to the bill of materials, is being built into freestanding desktop monitors that could be used with any PC when they hit the market later this year.

There Is No Touch in Apple's Snow Leopard

Beyond the all-in-one computers, other PCs are also getting a lot more attractive. Dell now offers the Studio Hybrid which is a compact (8.8 x 8.3 x 3 in.) unit available in a variety of colors and finishes, starting at $500. The HP Pavilion Slimline is less sexy than the Studio Hybrid—it's about twice as big and comes only in basic black—is in the cheap desktop computer range at approximately $300.

Oddly, Apple, whose iPhone brought the potential of multitouch interfaces to the public, has shown no interest in applying the technology to either its laptops or desktops and has added no touch features to the upcoming Snow Leopard version of the Mac OS X software. This gives a rare opportunity for Microsoft and Windows PC makers the opportunity to lead with a cool and truly useful feature. I would expect them to grab this opportunity and run with it before Apple wakes up and realizes what they have done.