Extending One’s Touch

By Rhoda Alexander

Rhoda Alexander
isuppli

In the mad vendor rush to cash in on the iPad phenomenon with similarly configured tablet devices, hardware designers are overlooking an opportunity to leapfrog over what Apple is currently offering by moving the mobile platform beyond a simple consumption tablet to include true creation offerings.

Today’s mobile media tablets offer a fresh doorway into an increasingly rich content environment, including websites, eBooks, movies, gaming, and a wealth of new applications. Touch provides the all-important key to a growing number of content doors, enabling users to easily flick from one application to another. Yet for the most part, these doors swing one way, allowing users to easily pull content while providing only rudimentary input options. The soft keyboards on the current crop of products fall far short of the tactile experience of an actual keyboard and stylus input has been largely abandoned in favor of developing applications that can be accessed with the touch of one or two fingers.

That approach works well for a pure consumption tablet but falls far short of what is required to move tablets forward as true creation devices. The ideal paperless solution would allow users to interact with the electronic content in the same way one does with the media it is replacing. This is particularly true in education environments where students and educators want more flexibility than a soft keyboard provides. They want the ability to make notes in margins and underline critical passages with the simple motion of a stylus, to jot down thoughts as they occur, and to sketch out a diagram or a mathematical solution.

Today’s touch tablets are still at the fingerprint stage of touch, with most of them offering only a two-finger approach to even that simple task and little ability to manipulate the virtual paint. Improved multi-touch, force sensing and haptics will all help to enhance the experience over time, allowing for better touch control and more accurate keystrokes.

Designers are understandably wary of pursuing stylus solutions, given the abundance of poorly executed solutions users have endured in the past, but improvements in touch technology, more powerful controllers, and increasingly sophisticated mobile operating systems make for a whole new design environment. The technology is there for the designer willing to take a chance on raising the game.

Rhoda Alexander, the director of monitor research for iSuppli Corporation, has more than 20 years of experience in display research and has authored multiple reports, including Portable and Desktop Solutions Are Ready to Feel the Touch. iSuppli Corporation is the global leader in technology value chain research and advisory services. Services afforded by iSuppli range from electronic component research to device-specific application market forecasts, from teardown analysis to consumer electronics, and from display device and systems research to automotive telematics, navigation and safety systems research. More information is available at isuppli.