Analysts seemed to groan when Apple introduced the iPad at Mac World earlier this year. Unlike the iPhone which seemed to capture the imagination right from the start, the iPad struck many as “neither fish-nor-fowl.” It was a bit under-powered to serve as a tablet computer (and who knows what to do with a tablet, anyway); and a bit too big and heavy to serve as an ebook reader. Some viewed the iPad as little more than an extension of the iPod and iPhone— another device with which to exercise you fingers.
The ambivalence expressed by reviewers and critics didn’t stop consumers from lining up around the block on the morning the iPad went on sale. Already (May 31st), Apple has sold two million of these slates. It is not inconceivable for iPad sales to reach 10 million units this year — and I’ve heard predictions of 300 million units per year, five years out.
The success of this machine has forced the analyst community to focus more tightly on the place of tablet computers among various hardware, a previously dormant category. I was intrigued by the tablets I saw one year at a Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHec) in Seattle. If, in fact, the tablets were any good at handwriting recognition, I figured, I could replace the steno pads I used as an editor/reporter with a tablet PC. The tablet could then automate that valuable first step I went through every time I wrote a story: converting my handwritten notes into editable computer text. But the accuracy of the process was about the same as speech-to-text software: excellent out of the box… and then progressively worse.
More recently, I’ve seen tablets at my Toyota service station: My service rep will check out my car, tablet in hand, checking “to do” boxes on a form with a stylus. Plugged into a cradle, the tablet would not only allow typed entries onto the form, but would connect with a server holding previous service records for the car. The service rep could also print out the “to do” list and a cost estimate from the computer. I suspect the return stations of some car rental companies will use tablets in much the same way.
But is this the kind of machinery Apple’s iPad is meant to replace? I don’t think so.
“Apple's iPad is more a supersized iPhone than conventional tablet,” wrote Gartner’s Carolina Milanesi in February. “The iPad's color screen and its iPhone-iTunes heritage make it more of a general computing and media device than a dedicated e-book reader or full tablet PC,” she insisted. It is entirely possible that the iPad could cannibalize ebook readers like the Nook and the Amazon Kindle. Unlike the ebooks, the iPad has an attractive screen and multimedia playback capability (including video as well as audio). But the fascination with the iPad, Carolina suggests, revolves almost entirely around Apple’s sophisticated use of touch-screen control.
The iPad does not use a single integrated touchscreen controller, but a cross-hatch of touch sensors controlled by a pair of Broadcom chips. Essentially, there is a low-level ac signal radiating from the electrodes that run in an x-y pattern across the screen. Putting your finger anywhere near the junction of those electrodes alters the capacitance across the junction, and subtly changes the frequency of the ac signal. The electrodes are placed close enough (or should be placed close enough) so that the touch of a single finger will be measured across several junctions. The screens used by Apple on both the iPad and the iPhone are multi-touch; that is, it will recognize multiple finger touches at the same time, a feature that will allow the machine to understand fingers opening or coming together, as well as taps and swipes.
At 9.7 inches, iPad is one of the largest LCDs to use a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen. Cypress Semiconductor, whose capacitive sensor signal conditioner served as the click-wheel controller for the original Apple iPod media player, demonstrated a 14-inch touch screen in January (about the same time the iPad was announced).
The Ancient History of Touch
Projected capacitance is now used in a wide variety of phones, such as the iPhone and iPad, the Motorola Droid, the Palm Pre, and a variety of HTC products marketed by AT&T — not to mention the touch interfaces for GPS-based portable navigation devices like those from Garmin, Magellan and Tom Tom. Not all the phone makers will support a touch interface as well as Apple, though. My company-supported cell phone, an iPhone knock-off from Taiwan’s HTC Corp., cannot tell a tap from a swipe. It will thus prevent me from answering a call, or call people I had no intension of dialing, and — failing to interpret the intent my touch — will frequently stall, until it sorts things out for itself. “Don’t expect all the touch-sensitive devices out there to work as well as the iPhone,” wrote Gartner’s Leslie Fierling. We are forewarned.
The projected capacitive interface used with the iPhone actually perfects cruder capacitive sensors with a finer resolution, which allows touch to be determined through a glass plate (rather than through a compressible membrane). Membrane touch screen controllers, many of them using a resistive technology, had already been widely deployed in test instruments and industrial controls. One technology, used in early-generation automatic teller machines (ATMs), is infrared, which uses an x-y array of infrared LEDs and photodetector pairs around the edges of the screen. A single touch will be registered as a disruption in the pattern of the light beams.
Hewlett-Packard used this for the personal computers they marketed in the 1980. (This would effectively make them the first to introduce a PC with a touch-screen interface.) I wrote a book about it this machine then, essentially, an applications guide, under contract to Hayden Books. (Ancient history: privately-held Hayden Publishing was the original publisher of Electronic Design magazine.) At the start of the PC revolution, there was not only considerable confusion over what kind of processors and operating systems dominate, there was also conflict over what kind of interface you could best use to initiate MS-DOS commands on an x86 architected machine. IBM, Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard each had their own, and though the each computer ran MS-DOS on an Intel CPU, their programs were not compatible.
I received advances from Hayden books on the applications guides I generated for the TI Personal Computer, and the HP Touchscreen Computer, but the books were never published. Hayden Publishing pitched HP for an endorsement of my book (better yet, why not BUY the book and ship a copy with each touchscreen sold?), but HP was not particularly responsive. The Touchscreen was not selling well, we learned, and the company had already decided to discontinue the machine, even before my manuscript was completed.
The Future of Touch
It was actually analyst Amy Leong (now vice president of marketing at MicroProbe) who put Gartner on the map with touch-screen technology. Amy went to CES one year, and cataloged all the consumer appliances using a touch interface. Triggered by the success of Apple’s iPhone, she wrote, adoption of the touch interface is increasing in all kinds of consumer electronics. Mobile phones, portable media players, and digital still cameras were the most likely suspects — but their use in PCs would likely skyrocket.
Microsoft Windows 7 is optimized for multi-touch for the PC market, she pointed out, and it offers broad touch support for all Windows-based applications. The launch of Windows 7 will significantly increase the number of touch-supported PC models in the near term. In December of 2009 — two months before the introduction of the iPad, Amy recommended computer builders should "ruggedize notebooks aimed at small children to withstand inadvertent abuse. Consider ‘slate’ alternatives to the clamshell form factor, and incorporate touchscreens, as young users will be quick adopters.”
Her “Strategic Planning Assumption": By 2015, more than 50% of PCs sold to users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens. Children will likely be the first demographic group to adopt touchscreen PCs, as they instinctively touch the screen for input before they learn to use the keyboard and mouse. Young users who have not had the chance to develop specific computing habits show a strong affinity for the direct manipulation that touchscreens enable.
Although Windows 7 will bring out more touch-enabled hardware, the PC industry still needs to address questions about software applications, hardware prices and system form factors, Amy wrote.
There will in fact be no end to the applications that will try to take advantage of the touch sensitivity of the iPhone or iPad — suited for children or not. Apple, we’re told, was not pleased with an application for the iPhone that gave you the image of a pretty woman. Swipe the image with your finger, and her clothes fall off. Said Fred Clarke, president of On the Go Girls, the software company that came up with this: “We’re showing stuff that’s racier than the Disney Channel, but not by much.”
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