Apple’s iPhone is making multitouch all the rage on mobile phones but laptop makers are not rushing to add the technology to traditional notebooks.
Multitouch, which lets users control applications through gestures on a screen, may not be the best interface for laptops because of the size and placement of the screen. In addition, there’s little integration between touchscreens and most software.
“You don’t see a lot of touchscreen notebooks because it is not intuitive to reach up and start touching the screen when there is a good keypad,” says Paul Moore, senior director product management at Fujitsu, one of the world’s biggest laptop makers.
Some pundits, such as Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan, argue that computer interfaces of the future will likely blend multitouch with gestures and physics (using accelerometers to detect bumps, shakes or the device’s orientation in space).
Already, many computing devices are using some or all of these techniques. Nintendo’s Wii uses physics — the location and movement of the controller through space — to control actions on screen while multitouch is becoming the interface of choice for smartphones like Google’s Android and Samsung’s Instinct.
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