Good luck using it while walking down the street, or anywhere that you have to stand up without a table nearby.

ever cosider it has s regular touch screen too?

nah, that would be to advanced for apple users to comprehend.



Hey, look over there, shiny plastic and bright colors!

"Sorry I missed your call earlier. I wasn't anywhere near a flat surface."

"Sorry I missed your call. My fucking phone crashed because it runs Windows. Yes, that Windows."

I am a .NET developer and I have written credit card processing apps on windows mobileon a Symbol. It's a very shitty platform. I also used to have a win mobile phone... Cingular 8125 ... for 5 months. It was utterly useless. Guess what I have now, and guess what is the best phone I have owned?

Anyway, interesting concept, but that's all. If it's useful someone will hack an Android phone to do the same thing.

I'm just going to point out that I'm not an Apple drone. I do not now nor have I ever owned a single Apple product. I don't make big choices about the brands I buy, but every computer I've owned so far has been Windows, and every mp3 player have been glorified flash drives from smaller companies like Sandisk.

Smart phone and PDA were invented to make it possible to do work while in places that other tools like laptops were not practical. Eventually they developed from ineffective stylus on screen set-ups to more practical keyboards. This was developed further, and resulted in touchscreens which allowed the same degree of portability while increasing the general size of the screen and adding some new user abilities such as changing the position, size, and angle of windows as is shown in this clip.

The reason I submitted this is that it's fucking retarded. There is no advantage to having a touchpad like this. It removes the user's ability to complete tasks anywhere without a flat surface, thus giving it less effective portability than a laptop computer. It also adds an unnecessary cursor to the screen rather than just having a person touch his finger to what he wishes to select, this is a wholly unnecessary step considering only those with severely handicapped hand-eye coordination would have trouble using a touchscreen interface. The only advantage I can see in this technology when compared to touchscreen is the lack of fingerprint and smudges. If this is the case, then Microsoft's money could have been better spent developing a smudge-resistant touch screen rather than ruining a perfectly functional product.

It's this mentality of innovation without practicality that leads to the invention of things like this and Microsoft Surface.

I use Apple products because they work for what I want. I certainly do not defend them to the death. There's a lot wrong with OSX and with Apple's product design and the like. There's just a lot less wrong with it than Windows or Linux, and meanwhile it's the only platform which Logic runs on anymore, and Logic is the only music software which doesn't make me feel like I'm crapping hedgehogs.

I have, but don't entirely like, an iPhone. I got it because, for all its problems and retardation, it has by far the closest thing to a usable compact portable interface. I have used well over a dozen different smartphone and PDA devices with a wide variety of operating systems (Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and others), and I only made do with them. When I got an iPod Touch to mess around with, I realized that there actually was something to its UI after all.

As a phone it fucking sucks, but I hardly ever use the phone (aside from the fact I can get online from anywhere, not just where there's WiFi coverage). Really I wanted a portable Internet tablet which would fit in my pocket, and the iPhone works perfectly for that. Notably, I use it for Internet stuff in situations where I am walking around. Generally this means not having a table to rest it on.

So, with all that said, *yes*, this MS research does look like an interesting idea and some neat technology, but it's a solution in search of a problem, and not a very good one at that. There are plenty of places they could make use of it, but a cellphone isn't one of them.

I used a PC from 1982-2007. I stopped using a PC because they are shit. I reluctantly and sadly became a mac person. It was a good choice.

hahahaha holy shit, words.

The only Apple product in my house is an Iphone4, and only because it was on sale after the latest one came out. I like it.
That being said, did anyone else notice how even when the user touched his finger to the edge of the phone, the cursor failed to reach the edge of the screen?

Damn, ninja'd.

Don't worry. Fluffy did it to me, too.

I recommend that if you want to look like you're first you should just reply to the first comment on the page regardless of whether your comment is actually a response to it or not.

Meanwhile I was responding to SolRo, not attempting to look like the first one to make a very blindingly-obvious point.

Apology accepted.