Microsoft has debuted a new video that shows what it imagines the future of technology will hold in the next five to 10 years, and it includes massive touchscreens, Siri-like voice controls, and Microsoft’s Surface tablet.

While Microsoft has shown us several astounding visions of the future before, this video is more of a practical take on what we will actually see rather than what can be imagined. And because this Microsoft, it has cameos of Windows Phone and Surface as devices that interact with large touchscreens and voice commands.

The video was put together to showcase the opening of Microsoft’s Envisioning Center, which focuses on making improvements to our daily lives with technology. Microsoft writes about the Envisioning Center in a blog post:

The facility encompasses scenarios at home, at work and places in between, and is inspired by our product teams, Microsoft Research and by the trends across the industry. I like to think of it as a concept car that allows us to share what it might be like to experience future technologies with visitors, get their feedback, tweak, remix and discuss. It’s all part of advancing the trends we think have the greatest potential.

As part of today’s opening, we put together a short video that gives a sense of what’s inside – and while none of these ideas are meant to be predictive about our products, they do highlight some of the key trends we’re investing in, such as machine learning and NUI. They also give you a sense of where these technologies could lead us over the next five to ten years.

Check out the video above to see Microsoft’s latest vision of the future.

That’s saying a lot since the mouse drove PC gaming for decades. Begemann made the assertion today in a speech at the opening of Casual Connect Europe, a casual game conference in Hamburg, Germany. Of course, since his company makes touch-screen games such as Diamond Dash, he is a little biased in their favor. Begemann said, “It’s ridiculous to try to add game controllers to a tablet, to make it more like an Xbox.”

Adding such controls to a touch-screen device ignores the innovations that are possible with the touch interface, and it represents an effort to bring tired game mechanisms over to a new platform. It’s like the old “light guns” created for Nintendo consoles for games such as “Duck Hunt.”

Such devices were limited and perfect for just one game, Begemann said.

Companies such as Nvidia, PowerA, and controller makers are creating controllers for Android gaming on tablets or smart TVs. But Begemann isn’t a fan of the smart TV because he thinks the games created for it will be very similar to those on consoles. On top of that, the TV manufacturers and controller makers would have to band together to come up with a common format in order to attract more game development. That’s not really happening, and it’s one of the reasons that Begemann is a big advocate of games on smartphones and tablets but not smart TVs.

“If every smart TV is a different platform, then you won’t see high-quality games on it,” Begemann told GamesBeat after his talk.

Every once in a while, a new platform comes along that draws innovation and game developers like a magnet.

Doom, launched by id Software in 1993, revolutionized mouse-based control with the first-person shooter genre. The mouse led to new genres of games like hidden-object games. It enabled titles like Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Bejeweled. Likewise, Begemann believes the touch screen will trigger new genres for today’s generation of players.

“The new options are either a new mechanism will be invented for first-person shooter games on the touch screen, or the genre will go away,” Begemann said.

Begemann said that Temple Run is a perfect example of designing for a smart device. If it had been ported from a console,  it likely would have been a landscape-mode sidescroller rather than a 3D-portrait-mode endless runner.

“The creators were able to rethink it from the ground up,” he said.

The advantages of touch screens include direct control. You make movements directly by tapping the world. It feels more personal. Also, gestures are easy to do with your finger. And multitouch lets you control multiple things at once.

Drawbacks include no ability to “mouse over” something. You can’t see through your fingers. You get no tactile feedback.

By the end of this year, there were be 1.4 billion smartphones and 217 million tablets in active use. By the end of next year, that will be 2 billion touch devices. About 40 million consoles sell each year.

“This will become the games platform of the future,” Begemann said.

People who are buying smartphones and tablets are using their PCs less. Within a few product generations, the PC will go away, he said.

“We have reached a peak, and it will decline for consumers,” Begemann said. “What can we do to be prepared? Build games for touch devices. We have to rethink game design. And reinvent existing genres for the touch device. If we do that, this era of touch will be the best era we ever have as a game industry.”

Disclosure: The conference organizers paid my way to attend the event as a speaker for it. Our coverage remains objective.

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Viewsonic debuted a new line of touchscreen display monitors at the 2013 CES today that are targeted at the next generation of PCs.

The company’s TD 40 Series displays are certified by Microsoft for use on PCs that run the new Windows 8 operating system. The displays come in three different sizes, including a 23-inch model for $599, a 27-inch model for $799, and a massive 32-inch model for $2,499 — (because why not own a TV-sized Windows 8 touch screen, even if you have no commercial application for it, amirite?).

Viewsonic said the 23-inch and 32-inch TD 40 series displays will be available for purchase in February, while the 27-inch model will hit retail shelves in April.

The new displays are a good solution for anyone who’s put a lot of time, money, and effort into their current upgraded Windows 8 PC, but still wants the touchscreen capability that the new OS is built around.

From Viewsonic’s release:

Exceptional interactivity comes standard in the TD 40 Series. With the 10-point projected capacitive touch technology, customers get the best in class touch experience with unparalleled accuracy and speed. The TD 40 family features Professional Grade IPS panels with 1920×1080 full HD resolution and 20,000,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio for stunning picture and color performance. Market leading connectivity inputs including DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA, along with full USB HID compliance and VESA mount compatibility make this Series the best Windows 8 certified commercial display investment.

But the Windows 8 certified displays isn’t the only new line of monitors Viewsonic announced at CES today.

The hardware maker is also showing off  its new VSD240, a 24-inch version of its Android smart display (aka a big tablet you don’t carry around). The smart display has a 1920 x 1080 resolution screen, a quad-core, 1.7Ghz processer from nVIDIA, a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam with integrated microphone, integrated speakers, and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

And for those that want to use it as a PC, the new Viewsonic smart display gives you the option of connecting peripherals (mice, keyboard) via USB ports or Bluetooth. You can also connect a PC or Laptop computer and use it as a traditional display, although I’m not sure why you ever would.

The new display will retail for $499 and be available to North American consumers in April 2013.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show is shaping up to be strikingly different from previous years — and it may just hint at changes for the entire technology industry in 2013.

Tablets have been the highlight of the past few shows, but they seem less important this time around. And Microsoft, which previously kicked things off with an opening keynote and a major presence on the show floor, is taking a major step back (likely to focus on its own events, like the recent massive Build conference).

For all the hype, companies, and press at CES, we haven’t seen any truly major announcements over the past few years. (The last big one I can remember was the blowout Palm Pre reveal from 2009.)  Other companies will inevitably fill the vacuum created by Microsoft’s absence. And now that the luster on smartphones and tablets is wearing off a bit, perhaps we’ll actually see something new and surprising this year.

Here are a few things we’re expecting to see (and some we’re not) at CES next week. (And check out our extensive interview with Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, which puts on CES.)

Startups play a bigger role in consumer electronics

Last year CES featured its first dedicated space for startups: Eureka Park. It was an oasis of innovation at the show (and it also helped that it was far from the crowded floor). Eureka Park was the highlight of last year’s CES for me. It’s where I encountered cool ideas like Perpetua’s body heat-powered wireless sensors, Bluestacks’ software for running Android apps on Windows, and A.M.P., a music-playing robot from Ologic.

Many of the startups demonstrating at Eureka Park last year sported some sort of physical product — something that’s surprisingly rare in the wider startup world. The variety of interesting companies at Eureka Park could be a sign that startups are ready to make a bigger splash in consumer electronics in 2013.

This year, Eureka Park will be 40 percent larger and will feature more than 140 different companies, according to CEA’s Karen Chupka. Eureka Park startups will also receive much more attention this year thanks to Showstoppers Launchit, a new demo-and-pitch event that will highlight the more interesting companies.

Qualcomm proves why it matters to you

Most consumers have likely never heard of Qualcomm, even though chances are good that they’re reliant on its mobile processors and wireless chips every day.

But that’s all going to change this year, as Qualcomm chief executive Dr. Paul Jacobs kicks off CES with the opening keynote. Neither Qualcomm nor Jacobs seem like the ideal successors to Microsoft’s and Steve Ballmer’s recent bombastic keynotes, but the change is nevertheless important. It shows that Qualcomm is finally willing to step into the spotlight, and that it may finally want some recognition. (Jacobs was also interviewed by Charlie Rose last night.)

With Qualcomm taking the lead, perhaps we’ll see more of a focus on the internal components making new devices possible at this CES. And instead of Microsoft’s pie in the sky research projects, which typically dominated its keynotes (but rarely made it to consumers), we’ll hear about realistic component advances that will actually impact shipping products.

Expect Qualcomm to make more noise throughout the year as it fights to become a household name.

Reduced emphasis on tablets and smartphones

CES, and indeed the entire mobile industry, has been a bit drunk on tablets over the past few years. More than 100 tablets were featured at the 2012 CES, and 2011 sported a similarly high number. The tablet bonanza mostly came from companies jumping over themselves to build Android devices — even if they weren’t offering anything unique. This year, the tablet sector seems more sane.

It’s pretty clear now that the market only has enough room for a few Android tablets to succeed. And with the success of the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, all signs are pointing to cheap and small tablets becoming the mainstay Android slates, a standard that’s difficult for smaller manufacturers to meet.

The advent of Windows 8 may lead to a few tablet announcements from big PC makers. But judging from what I’ve seen over the past year, most companies would rather hold their own media events later in the year to show off major new devices rather than fight for attention at CES.

Nvidia is expected to show off the Tegra 4, a powerful new mobile chip for smartphones and tablets, so we may also see some devices announced around that. But even if that does happen, Nvidia has mostly lost the mobile chipset battle to Qualcomm, so I won’t expect to see many Tegra 4 devices at CES.

I don’t expect many big smartphone announcements at the show, either. Samsung is hyping up a mysterious new device, but chances are slim that it’ll be the Galaxy S IV, the latest addition to its flagship line. It’s only been around eight months since the Galaxy S III debuted, and I can’t imagine Samsung would want to cut its lifetime short. I’ve also talked with a few mobile carriers who mentioned they won’t be showing off any significant new devices at the show.

Increased emphasis on touchscreen computers

Now that Windows 8 has proved Microsoft can merge both desktop functionality with the ease of tablets, expect more companies to show off their touchscreen-enabled computers at this year’s CES. While they’re not exactly new, this year touchscreen computers will finally have a vehicle to demonstrate their usefulness via Windows 8, something that wasn’t possible with previous desktop operating systems.

If I’ve learned one major thing from reviewing Microsoft’s Surface, it’s that touchscreen functionality in a notebook is more useful than you think.

Mirrorless cameras take the stage

Cameras like Sony’s NEX series, which offer the quality of a DSLR without the heft and expense, are all the rage in the these days. Mostly, it’s because mirrorless cameras have massive mainstream appeal — they offer higher quality and more options than simple pocket cameras, but aren’t as complicated as DSLRs.

This year the CEA awarded one of its CES Innovation Awards to Sony’s RX1, the first mirrorless camera to squeeze in a full-frame sensor (the current gold standard in DLSRs). There’s a good chance we’ll see a few more full-frame mirrorless cameras debut at the show. At the very least, we’ll see new models, new lenses, and even cheaper prices at CES this year.

Wrapping up: Another year of innovation ahead

CES is ultimately a trade show, meaning it’s intended more for the buyers and sellers who attend than media and consumers.

Despite all it has working against it — the crowds, the hype, Las Vegas — CES remains one of the most interesting tech events of the year. With so many companies and industry figures in one spot, it’s where we’ll begin to see the tech trends for the next year take shape. So even without the promise of a shiny new tablet on the horizon, I’m ultimately excited to brave the crowds this year along with the rest of the VentureBeat crew.

This week is an epic one for tech news.

I’m not talking about Apple. Sure, the iPad Mini that Apple just confirmed is a long-awaited addition to the company’s tablet line, and it’s one that Apple is virtually required to make — assuming it doesn’t want to keep losing market share to smaller, cheaper Android tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7.

No, the company I’ll be watching most closely this week is Microsoft.

Microsoft will launch Windows 8 and its own iPad competitor, the Surface, at the end of the week. These two products will be the test of whether the company can successfully manage the transition to a new era of computing.

The company has done it several times before, as I explained in a CNBC appearance earlier this week (see below). Microsoft started as a software vendor for hobbyist computers but turned into the dominant operating system provider in the PC era, thanks to a canny deal with IBM to provide MS-DOS for its computers.

Then, just as DOS started to fade, Microsoft managed the transition to a graphical world with a multi-year strategy to shift its customers to Windows in the 1990s.

As computers became increasingly connected to the Internet in the late 1990s, Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” strategy put it in a dominant position among Internet companies, successfully driving Netscape out of business and rocking AOL back on its heels. Of course, there was a small matter of an antitrust suit to deal with, and that arguably kept Microsoft on the sidelines as Google rose to dominance in the Web 2.0 era. (The consent decree Microsoft had to sign with the Department of Justice finally expired in 2011, after 10 years.)

Now the computing world is entering another new chapter. Desktops and notebooks are beginning a long, slow decline, to be replaced by what we now call “tablets” but soon will refer to simply as screens. Some of those screens will be small, some will be large, some will have removable keyboards and some will be mounted on walls as passive displays. Almost none will have permanently-attached keyboards or mice.

In short, voice and touch interfaces will dominate in the new, screen-centric era, and Microsoft knows it needs to make this transition if it wants to remain a dominant force in computing.

So the company is drawing on decades of experience with computing transitions to make this happen. Just as the early versions of Windows were based on DOS and still let you run DOS programs, Windows 8 is based on earlier versions of Windows and will let you run all the Windows programs you already have.

Sure, there’s a new interface to learn, but it’s hardly as radical or as disorienting as critics have made it out to be. With minimal training, even a three-year-old can manage the basics of opening programs, resizing screens, and going back to the Start screen. (I’ve been using Windows 8 at home for several months, on an older IBM Thinkpad, and it’s just fine.) As Joanna Stern wrote on ABC, it does require some willingness to accept change. Microsoft is almost certainly going to be pouring massive resources into educating consumers, via advertising and other means, so this interface won’t remain alien for long.

Still, if you don’t like it, ignore it. Switch over to the classic Windows view and pretend nothing has changed. That’s the genius of Microsoft’s strategy: It lets people put one foot in the tablet world while keeping another foot planted firmly in the past.

As a mentor told me long ago, best not to remove foot from stone until other foot is planted on next stone, Grasshopper.

Still, the Windows 8 transition is a risky strategy, and it is possible Microsoft will blow it. I’m not convinced that many people will actually buy the Surface, despite the rave reviews: I think it’s probably overpriced, and there are still no compelling apps. If history is any guide, it’ll take Microsoft several versions to get the touchscreen right, so it’ll probably be Windows 9 or Windows 10 before we see the full range of what the company is capable of.

Even if it’s not a guaranteed win, though, Windows 8 is Microsoft’s best shot at remaining relevant into the next decade. That’s why I’ll be watching its launch this week, and its reception in the weeks to come, with great interest.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Thursday, Amazon will make a number of hardware and software announcements all with the same goal in mind: to convince consumers and the media that its Kindle Fire tablet is an elegant device that can go head-to-head with Google’s Nexus 7 and Apple’s iPad.

At a press event in Santa Monica tomorrow, Amazon will likely unveil a high-end 7-inch Kindle Fire device with a faster processor, a camera, and an HDMI port at a very competitive price point.

Leaked Kindle Fire pic via The Verge; comparison image by Jolie O’Dell

The e-commerce juggernaut, according to rumors, may also debut an even more affordable 7-inch model with a slight RAM upgrade, a new interface, and a discounted price (possibly as low as $100) thanks to included special offers (a.k.a. advertisements).

The biggest weakness of the almost one-year-old Kindle Fire is that consumers perceive it to be a low-end tablet, Parks Associates mobile analyst Harry Wang told VentureBeat.

The price point of the tablet device, combined with touchscreen sensitivity issues, and a strategy focused on e-book and media sales may be sending the wrong message to shoppers.

“[Amazon's business strategies] have created the impression that this is a piece of cheap hardware. It doesn’t give you all you want and it cannot be put on par with the iPad experience,” Wang said.

With the two new devices, the manufacturer will have an opportunity to keep bargain hunters happy and win over tablet device snobs alike. The latter category is the most important one for the company given that Apple expected to step on its toes with an 7-inch device of its own and Google’s Nexus 7 is getting rave reviews.

Amazon will need to dramatically improve the user experience on the Kindle Fire to change consumer perception, Wang said. He expects exactly that with a better touchscreen, a faster chip set (possibly made by Qualcomm), and software upgrades. He even thinks we’ll sees a mobile network-enabled version for anywhere media consumption.

Despite the recent rumors to the contrary, Wang still anticipates a Kindle Fire with a larger screen, between 8.5 inches and 8.9 inches, though he said this device could be announced at a later date.

Wang believes that a larger device is in the works for a number of reasons, but primarily to compete with Apple. Amazon has been laying the groundwork for a device optimized for video consumption. The company has made a number of improvements to its Prime Instant video streaming service and today announced a licensing deal with Epix. Wang is looking for even more content partnerships to be announced tomorrow.

“I think for Kindle Fire to compete aggressively and effectively with iPad … [Amazon] will have to come up with a better tablet with a larger screen,” Wang said. “They’re adding more and more content to their media library, and they’re trying to get people to enjoy more of that type of content on the Kindle Fire. From that perspective, as a user and an analyst, the small screen experience for video consumption is not enough.”

Wang also said a larger screen would help Amazon fix some of the touchscreen sensitivity issues of the first-generation Kindle Fire.

Size upgrade or not, Amazon does need to address the delayed responsiveness of its Kindle Fire touchscreen. The company will likely do so through a combination of software and hardware improvements. Amazon initially fielded complaints in this area and quickly pushed out a firmware update to fix the problems.

“Based on my experience, [touchscreen sensitivity] is a little better, but it is not a significant improvement,” Wang said.

Should Amazon fix Fire’s issues and deliver a device that sheds the “cheap” perception, the company will be positioned to capitalize on the upcoming holiday shopping season. Amazon already has the distribution channels to outsell Google, but a high-end Fire could help it compete directly with the iPad Mini in the style arena.

Photo credit: ViaMoi/Flickr

It’s clear now that design is a big part of the mobile experience — heck, we dedicated an entire conference to the topic — but it’s still difficult for developers to balance touch functionality with an attractive interface. The design firm Zurb intends to fix this with Plunk, a new app runs simple tests for touchscreen targets.

In Plunk, you upload a mobile screen — it can be from an app, a mobile website, or anything else viewable on a mobile device — and create simple tests to make sure your users can easily touch where they need to. This Plunk test asks you to touch the flower in a cartoony image. Plunk’s results page for every test lets you see just how successful visitors are in real time — in this example, it could eventually tell the designer that the flower isn’t distinguished enough from the other images.

The app is just the latest in many design tools from Zurb, which includes the visual feedback app Bounce and the design framework Foundation.

With Plunk, designers should be able to easily see what works for mobile touch interaction. It’ll be especially appealing to the responsive design movement, which is focused on creating web designs that morph to fit different device screen sizes.

Front photo via Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft released the final build of Windows 8, dubbed “RTM,” to developers and manufacturers last week. So how will it work on your desktop when it lands on Oct. 26?

Based on my tests, not very well. In fact, if you’re still using a desktop PC, you’re probably going to dislike Windows 8.

Microsoft has designed Windows 8 to work across almost all devices, with the exception of smartphones, a nearly one-size-fits-all approach to the operating system. That’s a marked contrast to Apple’s decision to use iOS for tablets and phones, and OS X on desktops.

On top of this, Windows 8 will share a kernel with Windows Phone 8 to make it easier for developers to create apps and games that work for both.

Unfortunately, Windows 8 doesn’t work equally well for all devices. How I work on a desktop is going to be different from how I work on a tablet. Using my fingers to navigate through Windows is a wholly different experience than using a mouse to click on things.

With Windows 8, Microsoft favors tablets, touchscreens, and laptops with modern touchpads. It works very well for these kinds of computers. Traditional desktops with a keyboard and mouse, on the other hand, have been left in the dust.

Desktop issues

True, a major part of the OS is devoted to the traditional Windows desktop. The desktop view is there if you need to run older Windows applications, or if you just want a familiar-looking interface.

But the desktop view isn’t what Microsoft is pushing. Much like Apple’s Mac App Store, there will be a Windows 8 Store available for downloading the new full-screen apps Microsoft is betting heavily on. (Notably, the store won’t offer older Windows programs at all.) These new Windows 8-style apps appear on your computer’s Start screen and run in a full-screen mode without menu bars or toolbars. Microsoft has referred to its Windows Phone and Windows 8 interfaces as “Metro”, but it has ditched the term and not yet given us a replacement, so I’ll refer to it as the “modern” design. Indeed, much of the focus for Windows 8 is on the sleek Start screen (image above).

Now let’s dig into some of desktop issues. (Let us know what other issues you see for the desktop in the comments.)

Dead mouse — Windows 8 isn’t meant for mice — it’s meant for fingers. The spread-out Start screen is more ideal for tapping than clicking, whereas the Start menu in Windows 7 is crammed into a tighter space to make it easier to click individual items. Scrolling using your mouse now moves the screen left and right instead of up and down. Mouse scrolling can be problematic inside some modern apps. Parts of the Bing Weather app, for example, are meant to be scrolled up and down and can interrupt you. (Check out this video for an illustration of this problem.) Basically, scrolling through apps with your fingers is much easier.

Right-clicking — When you right click your mouse in Windows 7, a menu pops up next to where you clicked to give you more options. Right clicking a picture, for example, brings up options like Preview, Cut, Copy, or Delete. Right-clicking a program on the desktop Taskbar gives you lots of helpful options too. But right-click menus go out the window in Windows 8, unless you’re using an old-style desktop app. Now, instead of a menu of options appearing right where you clicked, a limited number of options appear at the bottom of the screen. You now need to move your mouse to the bottom of the screen to select an option, and this gets incredibly tedious in modern apps and on the Start screen.

Small displays — The modern-style Start screen and modern apps look great on tablet screens and small displays, but they can get a little messy on a desktop PC with a large monitor. Modern apps aren’t optimized for larger resolutions, although Microsoft makes it possible to scale apps. Microsoft is preparing Windows 8 for the world where 10- to 13-inch monitors are the norm, as ZDNet points out. Thankfully, Windows 8 at least includes decent multi-monitor support for power desktop users with two monitors.

Full-screen apps — Windows 8 already has some killer apps. Unfortunately, these apps are almost all better suited for tablets than desktops. There’s no “X” in the corner to exit apps in a single click like you can in Windows 7. Instead you have to click the very top of an app and drag it to the bottom of a screen to close it — an easy gesture on a touchscreen, but a laborious exercise with a mouse. It’s also not as easy to switch between these modern apps as it was with old-style desktop apps and the Windows 7 Taskbar.

Modern app switching — To switch between open modern apps using a mouse, you need to hover in the top left corner and then drag down to see the programs on the full left side of the screen. Only modern apps are shown in this lineup of open apps, not desktop apps. So if you want to switch between a modern app and an older desktop app, you need to go into the desktop and then select the desktop app you want. A two-step process has replaced the old one-step switch.

Screen splitting — Another issue with modern apps is the space allocated to them on the screen. When I work, I often divide my screen in two equal-sized windows. Modern apps don’t do this. You can only allocate roughly 25 percent of the screen to one app while the other 75 percent is taken up by another. This layout is not conducive to multitasking. Thankfully, you can still do a 50-50 split, or whatever tiling you’re used to, in the desktop area.

Hidden apps — It can be hard to find programs meant for the old-style Windows desktop if you don’t know where to go. From the desktop screen, you cannot launch desktop apps that aren’t already pinned to the Taskbar. That’s because the Start button is gone. Let’s say you use the Calculator app often. To access it, you have to go to the Start screen, right-click the screen, go to the bottom right-hand corner and select All Apps, then select Calculator. Once Calculator is open on the Desktop, you need to pin it to the Taskbar or you have to go through all of those steps again the next time you want it.

Internet Explorer tabs — This last point is minor, but the modern version of Internet Explorer 10 has no visible tabs. If you want to switch between tabs, you have to right click inside Internet Explorer to reveal your open tabs. I rely heavily on tabs to get my work done, so if you need them like I do, you’ll have to use old-style Internet Explorer from the desktop. While I don’t use Internet Explorer, it’s what comes available out of the box and many folks still use it. Alternately, you can download and use Google Chrome, which includes tabs in its modern app.

Tablet and touchscreen benefits

In its current form, Windows 8 is a tablet-centric OS. The interface works best on tablets, and we can’t wait to see it running on devices like the Microsoft Surface.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 are different beasts, and workflow is different when you have to deal with the Start screen versus the Start button. In Windows 7, I can do everything I can think of from a single screen. I can launch apps from the Taskbar or the Start button, I can easily re-size all my apps in different windows as needed, and everything feels optimized for an external mouse and keyboard.

Windows 8 requires me to switch between the desktop and the Start screen, which feels unnecessary. It shouldn’t take me extra steps if I choose to use a mouse, and that leads me to believe that Microsoft wants us to use tablets or ultrabooks instead of desktops. It also wants us to use full-screen modern apps instead of windowed desktop apps. (One exception: Microsoft Office 2013, which you launch from the Desktop but is more touch-friendly than past versions.)

The problems listed above show Microsoft is willing to alienate desktop users in favor of an interface that embraces touch screens and trackpads. Many businesses still rely on desktops for their workers, and it’s plausible that Windows 7 will remain the top choice for those businesses. That said, companies could adopt Windows 8 for tablets and hybrid laptops they want to deploy to workers.

After spending much time with Windows 8, I can’t recommend it for advanced desktop users unless Microsoft makes interface tweaks to make it more desktop-friendly. I don’t plan to upgrade my desktop from Windows 7 to 8 at launch because Windows 7 works so well. After several years of usage, I consider Windows 7 the best desktop OS ever, and I prefer it to Apple’s also-great Mountain Lion OS.

I expect Windows 7, with its 630 million licenses sold, will remain an incredibly popular OS for the next 10 years — just like Windows XP.

Ever since the iPhone came along in 2007, touchscreens have ruled electronic gadgets. Haptics, or touch feedback, hasn’t done as well. Will a new generation of better touch-feedback technologies take the touch revolution to the next level?

Christophe Ramstein, the chief executive of haptics startup Strategic Polymers, believes it will happen. He showed off a force-feedback module, dubbed an actuator (a tiny vibration motor) that was made out of bendable plastic and was the thinnest in the world today. Ramstein wants these little modules to be built into all kinds of gadgets so they can become easier to use, and he is one of a number of folks in a growing haptics industry who is encouraged about the coming era of force feedback.

“Existing technologies won’t make it,” Ramstein (pictured left) said in a talk at the Emerging Displays conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday. “We need a revolution. We need breakthrough technology.”

The lack of tactile feedback in most of today’s smartphones and tablets is a problem. Devices with physical keyboards have tiny keys that are too small for a lot of people to accurately hit them. Typing mistakes are hard to correct and they’re frustrating. You can often only use one finger at a time.

With haptics, the newest devices are bendable and hard to break. They can improve accuracy of touch by confirming that you have hit the right spot on a screen, Ramstein said. And they can produce both sound and vibrations. Haptic feedback gives you realism, confirmation, and rich communication. Besides Strategic Polymers, haptic companies include Immersion, Artificial Muscle, Senseg, Tactus, Smart Materials, Kyocera, AAC, Murata, SMK, and HiWave.

Steve Kingsley-Jones, another speaker at the event and the director of product management at Immersion, agreed that touch technology is critical to how we absorb and understand the world.

“It’s our goal to ensure that every mobile device on the planet feels good,” Kingsley-Jones said.

That is indeed a feel-good message. But even after years of trying, companies like Immersion have succeeded in getting their haptics technology built into tens of millions of cell phones, which are manufactured in the hundreds of millions every year. It won’t be easy to convince companies such as Apple, which has resisted force feedback technology for years, to adopt it now.

Ramstein said that the improved electro-mechanical polymer (EMP) technology that his company makes will enable haptics that is smaller, cheaper, and lighter than existing technology today. The EMP technology works by causing a material to bend when an electrical charge is applied to it. The chain of plastic molecules changes its shape under an applied voltage.

“It’s almost like a bag of cubes,” he said. “If you organize them and stack them, they take less space. When they are not organized, they take a lot more space. When you apply a voltage, the molecules line up.”

Ramstein believes forecasts that predict that 60 percent of smartphones will have advanced haptics by 2015.

By advanced, Ramstein means technology that vibrates in multiple locations, produces localized sounds, is integrated with a sensor, and supports multiple finger touches. It has to bend with a device and be both ultralight and flexible. Ramstein said that his modules have a response time of under 1 millisecond, making them faster, more elastic, and more forceful than competing technologies such as piezoceramic or elastomer. It is less than 50 microns thick (a micron is a millionth of a meter) and weighs less than a gram.

State College, Pa.-based Strategic Polymers hopes that its technology finds use beyond mobile applications. Other markets include car dashboards, home appliances, touchpads on laptops, speakers, and surgical tools. It is just one option of many haptics technologies that are coming down the road.

Ramstein became president and chief executive of Strategic Polymers in April. He replaced Ralph Russo, who ran the company since its founding in 2006. Russo was appointed chairman, replacing cofounder Qiming Zhang, who remains an advisor. Ramstein was previously chief technology officer at Immersion, a pioneer in haptics technology.

In 2010, the company focused its attention on haptics. The technology is still in development, and it is attracting attention from mobile device manufacturers, Ramstein said. The firm has about 20 employees.

The touchscreen revolution in display user interfaces has been going strong since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. Today, it shows no sign of stopping, and the market for touchscreen modules is expected to double from $16 billion in 2012 to $31.9 billion in 2018.

That bullish forecast comes from DisplaySearch, which is holding its Emerging Displays conference today and tomorrow in Santa Clara, Calif. It means that the touchscreen technology market is full of opportunities for hardware and software companies that are part of the huge $200 billion-plus display ecosystem, said Jennifer Colegrove (pictured above), the vice president of display technologies at DisplaySearch, in the opening talk at the event. But the market can be treacherous because of its cycles of overcapacity and commoditization that happen over time.

More than 200 suppliers have entered the market, providing technology in 12 different categories of displays. The aging resistive touchscreen technology still has 97 suppliers, up from 64 in 2009 — all providing screens that can detect touches from any kind of object well but are not really meant for multifinger touches. Projected capacitive screens, which have risen dramatically due to the popularity of multitouch (which uses multiple fingers on a screen), has grown from 27 suppliers in 2009 to 102 in 2012.

As you can probably guess, it’s hard to make money in the display business with so many suppliers. The overall display industry still loses tens of billions of dollars a quarter, particularly due to the saturation of flat-screen TVs, said Jeff Han (pictured at top), founder of Perceptive Pixel, a big-touch-display pioneer. Han’s company was formally acquired by Microsoft a couple of weeks ago to work on new display technologies.

After his talk, Han asked a panel of speakers, “Where is the best place to be to make profits in the industry?”

Colegrove said that the touchscreen module business was $4.3 billion in 2009 and was $11 billion in 2011. But in 2012, there is a 27 percent oversupply for the overall touchscreen module industry. That means there is too much manufacturing capacity compared to demand. So the result is downward pressure on prices for the touchscreen suppliers.

The suppliers include companies such as Corning, which makes the sturdy Gorilla Glass used in displays. Others include “cover lens finishing” suppliers such as Fuji Crystal. Others provide materials such as indium tin oxide glass and film components. And there are makers of touchscreen controller chips such as Atmel, Synaptics, Cypress, EETI, and Elan. The latter companies make chips that are smart enough to deal with noise problems such as a user’s unintentional palm touch on a screen.

All of these suppliers are in search of better large-screen applications of touch. Today, there are 24 major applications for touchscreens. The biggest are smartphones, tablet computers, and laptops.

Colegrove said that projected capacitive technology has probably hit its peak and new technologies will supplant it. Those include putting the sensor for touch on the cover, or a third piece of glass that protects the actual screens that sandwich lighting materials in a liquid crystal display. Other methods include in-cell and on-cell technologies that, like sensor-on-cover, reduce the cost, thickness, and weight of touchscreens.

Han said he sees a big future in “premium experiences” with touch technology, such as high-quality collaboration systems where enterprise workers share documents.

He said Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system coming this fall will enable touchscreens in a big way, allowing desktop PCs, notebooks and tablets to embrace touchscreen technologies that are more precise than in the past. He believes that the future of touch will be a combination of finger-touches on a screen as well as pen touches. You could, for instance, work on a desktop-size display. You could move the position of a virtual paper with your left hand and then draw pictures or trace images using your right hand.

Launching a new operating system may not require reinventing the wheel, but it could mean reinventing the keyboard.

That’s the conclusion Microsoft reached as it developed Windows 8, an operating system whose reliance on the touchscreen forced the company to reconsider even the tiniest of things about how users input and interact with text.

In a post on the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft user experience developer Kip Knox details these painstaking considerations, many of which touch on the most basic facets of tablet use. Microsoft obsessed over every single component of the keyboard: What do we do with the number row? How big should the spacebar be? Do we even need a keyboard at all?

To get the answers to these questions, Microsoft studied things as minor as how long users looked at on-screen objects, which words they typed most often, and how they held tablets in their hands.

Microsoft’s ensuing conclusions about user typing habits should be obvious to anyone who has ever used a touchscreen keyboard. One of the realizations was that the tablet’s lack of physical buttons or haptic feedback often makes typing difficult. To fix this issue, Microsoft added feedback cues like color changes and sounds, both of which are aimed at making the on-screen keyboard as close as possible to an actual keyboard.

And then there was the question of which keys should appear on the keyboard.

This is a big concern. With so little space on a tablet’s screen, every centimeter of real estate is important. While this is true with smartphones, it’s perhaps more true with tablets, which users are likely to be spending far more continuous time with.

So Microsoft did the obvious: It got rid of the keys that people didn’t use. This is the same straightforward line of thinking that allowed designers to get rid of both the start button and desktop widgets. With the ability to start anew, why keep features that got no use?

What emerged from the studies, perhaps disappointingly, is a keyboard that looks a whole lot like the one Apple installed on the iPad. It’s as if Microsoft thought it was the first to climb Mt. Everest only to find Apple’s flag already waving at its peak.

But the success of the Windows 8 keyboard depends less on how it looks and more on how it functions. While Microsoft isn’t first to consider these things, it’s still a good sign for Windows 8 users that the company’s spending so much time sweating the small stuff.

Apple won a surprising patent today for a finger swipe motion that seems second nature to smartphone users. The company, which is embroiled in a number of patent lawsuits, is seemingly only adding fire to its arsenal.

The patent encompasses the detection of an object on the screen that controls the scrolling of a list on the phone. Yes, the swiping motion your finger uses to reveal more e-mails is now Apple’s. It also describes the experience of reaching the end of the list and seeing the “an area beyond the terminus,” or what looks to be the back of the screen. This was originally filed in 2008. Another patent details the “pinch and zoom” motion, as well as using your finger to move the image so you can see it in detail. As Cnet notes, it’s pretty impressive that such an intuitive motion is now a part of Apple’s patent portfolio. And undoubtedly we will see this used against others in patent litigation.

But it seems patent lawsuits are being more heavily scrutinized as the battle for IP heats up between companies such as Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and others. A case with the potential to become a pivotal moment for the Apple/Google patent relationship was recently thrown out by Judge Richard Posner. Judge Posner explained that neither side was able to prove that one smartphone was more financially deserving of damages than the other in a patent war that pitted the iPhone against the Android (who saw that coming). It seemed that Judge Posner came away from the trial with the opinion that the patent system is broken, but you can expect to see these two companies, and a slew of others continue to battle it out.

Apple also won a patent that could bring about new chargers for the iPhone. The system allows the iPhone, or potentially the iPad, to be charged via an “inductive charging dock.” This means the device only needs to sit on the charger, not be plugged in. But don’t think this will get rid of the built-in ports, however. You’ll still need to be able to connect to a computer for operating system updates and other functions.

via Patently Apple

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Copy and paste is for squares. The future of search on Android-powered mobile devices will be all about circles, if a recently filed patent by Google is any indication.

Google has invented a new way to search on touchscreens with a functionality it calls “continuous gestures,” according to a patent discovered and dissected by Patently Apple. In essence, continuous gestures will let you simply circle content such as text, photos, and videos to search Google or other sites.

A continuous gesture is a two-part action that starts with the user drawing a “g,” or another letter, to indicate a desired activity, and then continuing the movement by lassoing content to be acted on. So you would draw a “g” to indicate a desired Google search and then continue the gesture by circling the content you wanted to search. Drawing another letter, say a “w,” would perform a different action — in this case a Wikipedia search.

The patent also includes specifications for handling ambiguous drawings (of which, we’re sure they’ll be many) and multi-content searches. “If a user has a news article open that displays the words ‘restaurant’ and ‘Thai food’ and a map of New York City, a user may, via a series of continuous gestures cause a search to be performed on the phrase ‘Thai food restaurant New York City,’” Patently Apple explained.

The Google patent was filed in the third quarter of 2011 and was recently published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to the patent blog.

No word from Google on if and when the company plans to implement these intriguing search concepts.

“We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t,” a Google representative told VentureBeat. “Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”

Photo credits: Shutterstock and Patently Apple

Cambrios Technologies is announcing today that it has hired John LeMoncheck as its new chief executive and raised $5 million in a fourth round of funding from strategic investor Samsung Venture Investment.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.,-based company uses nanotechnology to create a thin transparent film that can conduct electricity. The film turns out to be ideal for adding touchscreen capability to any kind of display, from a smartphone to a big flat-panel TV. It has the dual benefit of being able to conduct well and be transparent at the same time.

LeMoncheck (pictured) said in an interview that his jobs is to help the company develop the sales and marketing chops to sell its solution across a variety of industries.

Michael Knapp, founding president and CEO of Cambrios, will become chairman. The goal of both investment and the new CEO is to accelerate product introductions and commercial growth in the consumer electronics markets. LeMoncheck was previously CEO of SiBEAM, a pioneer in 60-gigahertz wireless networking chips. He sold that company to Silicon Image last year for $25 million. That wasn’t the highest price, but it was the right destination company for the technology and it underscored how tough it is to get new semiconductor companies off the ground, LeMoncheck said.

By contrast, LeMoncheck believes that Cambrios has a unique opportunity to capitalize on its transparent conductor technology in touch, display, solar, and lighting markets.

The technology has interesting roots. It was born from a collaboration of Angela Belcher, a chemistry researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Evelyn Hu of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Belcher saw how abalone and other sea creatures used proteins to build orderly, inorganic films based on calcium and silicon. She found proteins that would do the same with inorganic materials that had industrial applications. They found materials that would self-assemble themselves into thin layers of film.

In 2002, Hu and Belcher created Cambrios and got their first round of funding, $1.8 million, in 2003. They recruited Knapp and raised a second round of $12 million in 2005. The investors included In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“John’s successful track record of collaborating with customers and developing essential industry-wide partnerships makes him the ideal candidate to lead and help cultivate new relationships for Cambrios,” said Leighton Read, current board member and a partner at Alloy Ventures, an investor in Cambrios.

The Samsung investment will help the company launch the ClearOhm materials, which include a silver-like material that can be sprayed like an ink onto a clear film, creating a web of microscopic wires on the film that can be used to conduct electricity and thereby form the basis for a touchscreen. The coating of ClearOhm works a lot better than the existing solution of indium tin oxide, Lemoncheck said. It results in a much more transparent display that is good at conducting electricity; normally, there’s a trade-off between conductivity and transparency.

Dong Su Kim, investmet director at Samsung Ventures America, said that Cambrios leads the market with the development of this kind of material using nanotechnology.

“We started out with a film, but we did that to seed the market,” LeMoncheck said. “Now we are increasingly selling the ink for that film.”

The ink business is a lot less capital-intensive than the film business, he said.

The first device to use the new displays were a smartphone from China’s Huawei Technologies last year. That device proved the technology and sold in the hundreds of thousands. Synaptics partnered with Cambrios on the technology.The technology can also be used for electro-magnetic shielding for displays, helping them handle touch operations more accurately.

The indium tin oxide market was about $2.5 billion last year, according to LeMoncheck. Cambrios has 43 employees. The film is sold by the square meter and the ink is sold by the bucket, LeMoncheck said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Synaptics showed off how touch controls will change in the next year at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Synaptics has a big market share in touch application hardware and it showed off its latest products at the show.

In the picture at right, you can see that upcoming touchpads for laptops will be able to handle the simultaneous input from more than just two fingers. The image at the right shows how you can use five fingers on a touchpad at the same time. This enables apps like multi-finger painting or more complex gesture commands using your fingers. You can scroll with two fingers or flick an image from one part of the screen to another with four fingers.

With Ultrabooks, which are thin laptops akin to Apple’s MacBook Air, another wave of change is coming. With more than 70 models on the way, the Ultrabooks will use touch both in the touchpad for the cursor control as well as a touchscreen. The touchpads for the Ultrabooks could become much larger than is typical, particularly with Windows 8 coming out later in the year. You can use one or two fingers to move the Metro user interface (pictured left) with lots of block-oriented buttons you can click on.

Synaptics has technologies that it calls a TouchPad, or a touch-sensitive surface such as a laptop touchpad; a ClickPad, which can be used for scrolling and pointing just like a TouchPad but can also be used to replace physical buttons; a ClearPad, a touchscreen solution; and InterTouch, for multi-finger and multi-gesture support on touchpads, used in combination with TouchPads or ClickPads.

Right now, ClickPads are shipping in Ultrabooks such as the Lenovo U300s, HP Folio 13, and the Acer Aspire S3. The InterTouch uses a faster connection within the computer to transfer more data at the same time. That’s why it allows for multiple-finger touches at the same time. It’s very responsive. In the touch painting, you can see little halos on the screen so you can see where your fingers are.

With Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, Microsoft wants computer makers to use larger touchpads. Synaptics is recommending that computer makers use a large image-sensing ClickPad with a high-speed connection to get an optimal result. Synaptics is working as an engineering partner with Microsoft so that it can enable computer makers to design the bigger touchpads (at least 4.9-inch diagonal) into the limited space in the thinner laptops. The experience is intended to be the same as working with a smaller touchpad, so users don’t get confused when they move to Windows 8.

“It means the days of the little touchstick are long gone,” said Rick Bergman (pictured right), chief executive of Synaptics, in an interview. “We’re absolutely in a very cool space.”

Intel believes that Ultrabooks will have touchscreens, though some people believe that’s not going to work so well. Synaptics is covered on both options, as it has touchscreen and touchpad technologies, Bergman said. Definitely, though, some machines will have both. Convertible laptops, for instance, will be used with touchpads when they are in a regular laptop mode. But they can be used as touchscreens when you twist the screen around and use them as tablets.

Some of the desktop computers are also have built-in touchpads so that you don’t have to attach a mouse to the computer.

Touch controls are also spreading throughout the digital home. TVs, set-top boxes, and internet-enabled media centers or Blu-ray players will likely make navigation more complicated as they take on more functions. To deal with that, companies such as Panasonic are creating remote controls with built-in touch surfaces (pictured left). With button-based remotes, it’s harder to surf through a bunch of media selections. But as the second video below shows, it’s much easier to use a small touchpad embedded within a remote to move a cursor across a screen.

Philips has a dual remote where you can use buttons or a touchpad. It is shipping with Iomega TVs in Europe. Synaptics also has screens that can respond to both touch and pen input.

Here are two videos where Jacqui from Synaptics shows us the variety of touch-oriented technologies that the company is working on touch concepts for the coming year.

Each year, touch technology is getting better and better, but device engineers and consumers are also getting more demanding and have no tolerance for flaws in touchscreens. So the San Jose, Calif.-based company is unveiling its next generation of maXTouch S series of controllers for touchscreens — the chips that determine how quickly and precisely the screens react when you swipe your finger across them. The chips enable screens up to 17 inches diagonal that can track the movement of an unlimited number of fingers at the same time.

The chips work with smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, e-readers and other applications. Atmel has three versions of the chips that work for everything from a 4.3-inch screen smartphone to a 17-inch tablet running Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The chips enable smaller devices and form factors, responsiveness, higher-quality displays, great battery life, and multiple ways of capturing user input, such as a pen or a finger.

“We’re trying to deliver on the wish list that designers have always wanted in a touchscreen,” said Sherif Hanna, tablet touchscreens marketing manager at Atmel, in an interview. “The devices still don’t feel and behave as they should.”

The S series chips have SlimSensor technology, which enables a thinner and lighter screen without sacrificing responsiveness, touch fidelity or battery life. The chips can eliminate display noise and still operate twice as fast in responsiveness than previous chips. Since the touch sensors can be 60 percent smaller in these new chips, system designers can reduce the thickness of a screen by more than one millimeter. That is a huge reduction, considering some phones are only seven millimeters thick.

Atmel is also adding a new feature for the S series chips: maXCharger technology, which blends analog circuits and mathematical formulas that enable battery chargers that are much more efficient. The technology eliminates false touches — where the screen reacts to an unintentional touch. It can also suppress severe electrical noise spikes, making the devices about three times more responsive to touch. This means your device won’t get messed up when you plug a low-quality charger into it, something that happens a lot now that many devices use universal serial bus (USB) chargers.

Production versions of the maXTouch S series chips will be available in the first quarter. For the unlimited touch maXTouch chips, this is the third generation of chips. Prior versions were launched in 2011 and 2009. Rivals include Cypress Semiconductor, Synaptics and a number of Asian competitors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Now that capacitive touchscreens have become the standard in mobile devices, many are looking for  the next big innovation.

3D is one possibility — smartphones featuring the technology like the Evo 3D are already available. But according to Synaptics technology strategist Andrew Hsu, father of the capacitive touchscreen, the future of touchscreens could more likely lie in haptics, a technology which would allow us to feel individual touchscreen elements.

“Where I see the next frontier of user interface control is that we now want to try and recreate the tactility we lost from traditional hardware interfaces,” Hsu said in an interview with VentureBeat. Refined haptics could bring us full circle in mobile interfaces, allowing us to feel software keyboards and buttons as if they were physical elements from cellphones in pre-iPhone days.

“Now that we’ve gotten dynamic touch and visual interfaces, it’s time to look towards dynamic touch feedback,” Hsu said.

Haptics isn’t exactly a new phenomenon — today many cellphones feature basic haptic feedback by buzzing when you hit a button on their touchscreens. The real key for refining the technology, according to Hsu, would be finding an implementation that would allow for finer localization of haptic feedback. He assumes it could take three to five years before his vision of deep haptic feedback comes to pass.

We’re already seeing small steps towards next-generation haptics from companies like Immersion, which has developed an Android platform to easily bring haptic capabilities to smartphones and tablets.

And what of 3D? Hsu wouldn’t make any final judgements on the technology yet, especially since it mostly seems like an excuse to create and view 3D media on phones at the moment, rather than fundamentally altering the way users interact with their devices. 3D screens could technically work together with future haptic technology. Hsu said he was really impressed with the Nintendo 3DS because it was made specifically with 3D in mind, unlike 3D smartphones and tablets.

Personally, the idea of a fully haptic screen excites me more than just a 3D screen. There’s plenty of potential in mobile gaming (imagine actually feeling buttons and joysticks again), and it would also make modern touchscreen phones more accessible for the disabled and elderly. I’d much rather the mobile industry move towards screens that can dynamically generate braille text for the blind to touch, rather than focusing on making us cross-eyed with tiny 3D screens.

Unlike the bulky original Surface, which required a large cabinet to house cameras, the new version looks no thicker than a traditional LCD. Microsoft’s new PixelSense technology allows the new Surface displays to see without the need for a camera. It can recognize fingers, hands and other objects pressed directly onto the screen. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where the technology was unveiled, a Microsoft representative showed how it can recognize text written onto a piece of paper.

Microsoft worked together with Samsung to deliver the new version of Surface, which will be available for retail as the “Samsung SUR40 with Microsoft Surface”. The company lists Red Bull and the Royal Bank of Canada as early adopters of the new technology, and it will also be available in Microsoft’s retail stores.

The new Surface can be mounted on walls, instead of being something you look down on like the previous version. The Royal Bank of Canada will be using the displays to read forms that are mailed to its customers. With the new form factor, there are vastly more potential uses for Surface.

Microsoft says the Samsung SUR40 will be available in 23 countries worldwide later this year. The original Surface cost $12,500 for commercial buyers. Microsoft now says the new model will retail for $7,600 — still not a consumer-friendly price, but a welcome drop.

Until recently, a device designer wanting to add a touchscreen to a device would have faced a lot of challenges. Integration issues, increased cost, usability problems would have stood in the way. But now that mobile handsets have made touchscreens ubiquitous, that resistance has all but evaporated. A number of suppliers (including my own company, Synaptics) have now proven touchscreen technology in the high-volume handset market, and the supply chain is rapidly lowering costs and solving usability issues.

Resistive touchscreen technology is still the lowest-cost alternative; however, newer capacitive-based products are increasingly cost competitive. And where manufacturers would formerly have nixed the idea of adding touch-enabled displays purely on the basis of cost, they now see the technology as essential to increasing their sales and helping them stay competitive. Indeed, a common rally cry heard in many design meetings continues to be, “We have to make our device work like the iPhone.”

Touchscreens are more than just a cool way to interface with a device. They allow designers to create highly dynamic, configurable, personalizable controls for a device, which means designers can optimize the device controls in software to suit the needs of any particular application or use scenario. Yes, designers now have a virtually open canvas to create customized user interfaces. As an end-user, I certainly appreciate the design economy and usability benefits of dynamic user interfaces. For example, when my touchscreen phone is running its music player application, a customized set of control elements appears on the screen. The custom UI is optimized to provide information about each control and only show the control that can be used at any given time. This is in stark contrast to hardware-based controls, in which users are forever trying to figure out what each button does in a given application (or if that button even does anything at all).

But with opportunity and flexibility come much responsibility. Unlike mechanical controls, which designers have to take into consideration during the hardware design phase, a touchscreen shifts the planning of device controls into the software design phase. This shift can certainly improve the user experience, since designers can implement the layout with fewer hardware constraints. However, the shift could also lead to real disasters in usability. The obvious example is inconsistent behavior of controls across applications — imagine how confusing it would be if a touchscreen phone required users to single-tap the virtual keypad buttons to dial phone numbers but to double-tap on the virtual buttons in their music player application.

And then there are two serious discoverability challenges involved. The first of these are the functions included for power users of a particular application that standard users won’t be aware of. These are routinely exploited in games — remember those secret “fierce” maneuvers in Mortal Kombat activated by pressing buttons in a specific sequences? Another example might be a virtual button whose function changes if you press it for an extended period of time.

The second discoverability challenge is much more serious and is perhaps the most daunting issue in my anecdotal survey of what scares people about touchscreen-based interfaces. This is the problem of how to clearly and intuitively identify user controls from other things drawn on the screen. Although touching a display element that is not designed to be touched does not result in any particular interaction crisis or damage to a device, it can cause significant frustration among users as they attempt to figure out which on-screen elements are touchable (who reads user manuals these days?). This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that most devices still don’t offer any type of feedback to users that a touch input has occurred. So users can’t figure out if they touched the element correctly but the device didn’t respond, if they didn’t touch it correctly, or if the element they thought was touchable, in fact wasn’t.

Not surprisingly, many people, especially older user who grew up on well-defined mechanical input controls, shy away from touchscreen devices, claiming the interfaces are too hard to use.

So what should be done to address this usability challenge? Quite possibly, nothing. Over time, people will simply learn how to cope with this issue and automatically understand the difference between touchable and non-touchable graphics elements. For example, in the Android user interface, users already know that touching the signal strength bars at the top of the screen doesn’t do anything (although it probably should) but that dragging the entire top bar of graphics elements downward will expose the “curtain” of recent status updates. And if the market consolidates into a handful of de facto standards, there’ll be fewer quirky interfaces people will need to learn. This is effectively how QWERTY keyboards persist despite their horrible usability.

But with a de facto standard interface evolving, there continues to be a huge opportunity for someone or some organization to “get things right” with a well-designed touchscreen interface. While Donald Norman passionately makes the case for good design in his landmark book The Design of Everyday Things, it’s time to recast his principles of good design to software-based user interfaces as they make the shift to touchscreens. It could be this recognition and execution of good software user interface design that will finally convince many, including my mother, to buy into the fact that touchscreens can make devices better, not just more confusing.

What do you think about the usability challenge?

Will interface design standards make touchscreens more usable?customer surveys

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What will it take to make mobile payments mainstream in the US?

Dr. Andrew Hsu has been the primary technical contact for Synaptics’ worldwide customers in the handheld space since 1999. He joined Synaptics in 1996 and led the company’s efforts into establishing a presence in the mobile handset market. Hsu developed Synaptics’ ClearPad technology, a transparent sensor that can be mounted under curved plastic and glass. He led the marketing for ClearPad, resulting in the first production phone with a capacitive touchscreen, the LG Prada. Prior to his current role, Hsu was a scientist and a design engineer that helped develop the first single-chip TouchPad solution for Synaptics.