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Touch Me in the Morning

The iPad is here.  That is exciting, another device in the touch tablet arena.  Apple has entered the fray, bringing more publicity and notice – it can’t help but make things better.  Let me give you a few words of experience from someone who owns a touch pc – the HP TouchSmart TX2 with Windows 7.

Things in the larger world of the PC and internet are not as touch friendly as things on a touch enabled phone like the iPhone or Blackberry Storm, or other device.  Those devices have applications written specifically for that interface, with limited web browsing.  We use those devices for the web, but it isn’t a very satisfying experience because we can’t do all the things we want on our larger systems.  It is the same with using the TX2 as just a tablet.  Your finger just can’t get to the fine detail of the mouse our touchpad, and you often find you need to go back a screen or two and try again.

Using the onscreen keyboard is not as simple as it may seem.  For a touch typist like me, it just isn’t natural, and again I keep missing the keys I want to hit.  Even for someone who uses ‘hunt and peck’ believe it or not, your finger aim just doesn’t quite work as well as you might think.

Using the web is not quite straightforward either.  The browser might support touch and gestures, but the site probably won’t, and every time you need to log in with a name or password means more typing.  There’s a reason why Apple wants to offer you an optional real keyboard.  Having a ‘third’ device between computer and phone is good, but most of us like to use all three types of features at the same time in the living room.  A Hulu video, while browsing or posting (like I’m doing right now) is a good thing, and having a tablet doesn’t help this process in any way – it is only because the TX2 is a full computer, and can run multiple applications, that I can get this all done at the same time.

As long as you stay in the touch world, with applications specifically designed for touch, you’ll be fine, but venturing out into the general computing world, like the web, gets a bit more dodgy.  But I do like playing Bejeweled 2 on the touch screen.