Touchscreen PCs: 3 Things to Change
Two-point multi-touch? Check. Responsiveness for all? Well...
As we finally tried out the MSI Wind Top AE2280 (available at the company's COMPUTEX 2010 booth), three badly needed changes to Windows touchscreen PCs came to mind.
Always provide enough resources for responsiveness
MSI's offering was powerful enough to respond immediately to user touch-input. Why shouldn't it be, with at least a Core i3 530 and 4 GB of DDR3 memory? However, not all tablet PCs however are that responsive. The Lenovo ST10-3t we tried out was a very compact 10" swivel tablet PC, but with only 1GB of RAM onboard, many touch commands suffered from interface lag.
For a touch interface to be truly useful, it has to react immediately. Once the user taps, something should instantly happen. Companies shouldn't release tablet PCs that don't have the hardware required for a responsive user experience.
Build more fuzzy logic into the system
Users are notoriously imprecise and inconsistent, which is why interface systems shouldn't be too obsessive-compulsive. The Wind Top's touch controls are similar to Apple's "original" system, but some gestures need a relatively inconvenient degree of precision before working properly. In other words, we sometimes had to do our gestures "properly" to get the Wind Top to recognize them. That took us longer that we liked, so we unconsciously reached for a mouse and keyboard once again.
While randomly moving your fingers around a touchscreen shouldn't result in anything, perhaps the detection system should be a little more forgiving?
Get rid of those damn raised bevels!
True tablet PCs, the ones that are basically digitized slates, get it right: make the display flush with the supporting frame so that people have more space to tap their fingers on. At the same time, this makes it much easier to tap items on the corners of the display. The user doesn't have to take care to keep their finger away from the bezeling as much as possible in this configuration.
So why do PC manufacturers like MSI and Lenovo insist on the classic monitor configuration, with the surrounding raised slightly relative to the actual screen? Make everything one flat plane, and tapping everywhere becomes much easier.
What about you?
How has your experience with Windows touchscreen PCs been? Whether or not you think it needs improving, feel free to share your comment below.
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Ok, here's the thing... if you're going to create articles as filler, then maybe add some technical stuff to get us thinking.
I used to own an Archos 9 and as described by ALL reviews, the thing performed like a snail. Touch the screen, wait, done. But, I decided that if I were to buy a 9, then I would most certainly replace the really slow 1.8" hard drive with an SSD.
I did just that. Touch the screen, it did what it was supposed to do with speed. Tablets NEED ssd drives. They just do. That and certain things turned off like various services, scheduled defrag and the best one, indexing (WIndows Search)
Of course, this information is readily available via tech sites, that is, if they feel like it.
P.s. I now still own an Asus R2h and from last week ish, a nice Acer 1820ptz with a crucial 64Gb SSD. Is the Acer fast? VERY.
P.p.s I've did also own the Latitude XT and XT2 after the XT broke. The XT with it's slow pata based zif 1.8" drive really struggled until I added an SSD, which then reduced the 'lag' when touching. No problems. The XT2 with it's 1.8" sata SSD really did work well. I enjoyed that device.
The Toshiba M750 wasn't bad but didn't feature multi-touch. One aspect that I found great with the XT2, was the delightful multi-touch typing experience with the on screen windows keyboard. (Better than the 1820ptz)
I just hope that someone, one day, releases something like the HP TC1100 with multi-touch.
I agree with the article. Touch interface will remain just a gimmick to fool the gullible until faster hardware makes the whole experience more sublime.