Hewlett-Packard (HP) is planning to stir up the touch panel notebook market with multi-touch technology at the end of this year, and with Windows 7, which according to Microsoft will include features to take advantage of multi-touch capabilities, on the horizon, notebook industry players are paying close attention to the development of multi-touch technologies.
Touch panel tablet PCs are mostly niche market products currently and usually single-touch only due to costs and limited software support. However, notebook industry players believe multi-touch has the potential to take off in the mainstream market thanks to handset devices such as the iPhone. Windows 7 will also be key for promoting multi-touch since it enables multi-touch interfaces as part of the Windows operating system, the sources noted.
HP has progressively brought touch panel notebooks to the mainstream market since it introduced the first touch panel PC, the TouchSmart, at the end of 2007. Asustek Computer is also set to launch multi-touch products for its mainstream notebook and Eee PC lines, according to previous reports.
But some industry players commented that 2009 will only see multi-touch notebooks enter the trail stages and will not become mainstream until later.
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