Dell demos Latitude XT Tablet PC and multi-touch?
Engadget had me all excited. They are reporting that Dell’s forthcoming Tablet PC (Latitude XT Tablet PC) will sport multi-touch. Not dual touch. Not two finger touch. But real, five finger multi-touch.
My excitement dissipated though, once I watched the video of the demo which JKKMobile captured and posted on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00mKTEqnzbs
In the video, the Dell demoer definitely shows a couple very cool multi-touch demos, but he also clearly states that this is something going on in the lab.
My take on all of this is that Engadget has it wrong. Dell is experimenting with multi-touch, but that doesn’t mean that their Tablet is going to be released with it.
Oh well. My heart can now get back to beating normally.
The more I think about this, the more I can’t imagine Dell releasing a multi-touch feature anyway. There’s no support for multi-touch in the Tablet PC SDK. So they’d have to come up with some special API of their own. That’s something I don’t see happening. But I might be wrong.
If it does, it would no doubt be a nudge to the Microsoft Tablet PC group to get their multi-touch act together. Microsoft has demoed a two-point touch using a custom driver at a recent hardware event–but as far as supporting five fingers I haven’t heard of anything comparable that they are doing for Tablets.
Again, I don’t see this coming out of the lab any time soon. And I don’t think anything is going to happen unless Dell and Microsoft come together to standardize on how multi-touch should work. Because Tablet developers aren’t going to want to develop apps just for Dell Tablets. Maybe a few will, but it won’t catch on until apps can reach a broader audience.
Well, we’ll have to see. My prediction is no multi-touch this go around. Maybe in a year or two, but not now. Am I wrong? Could be.