Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone - is a touch-screen coffee table!
Microsoft unveiled a coffee-table-shaped
“surface computer” on Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder
Bill Gates’s view of the future.
Or is it a Ouija Board running Vista?
Microsoft unveiled a coffee-table-shaped “surface computer” on Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder Bill Gates’s view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch.
Microsoft Surface, which has a 30-inch display under a hard-plastic tabletop, allows people to touch and move objects on screen for everything from digital finger painting and jigsaw puzzles to ordering off a virtual menu in a restaurant.
They haven’t said that it will place calls for you; but, their “partner” is T-Mobile. And you can change your ringtones with it.
Microsoft shunned its usual PC manufacturing partners and decided to take control of the surface computer’s hardware production using an undisclosed contract manufacturer. It will run the Windows Vista operating system.
The company is selling the Surface for between $5,000 and $10,000 each, but aims to bring prices down to consumer levels in three to five years and introduce various shapes and forms.
When young and brash, I will admit to occasionally bragging that I could sell blue sky - or ears to an elephant. I could sell this - and I know exactly the people to sell it to.
No, I wouldn’t buy one for myself, though. Or sell one to a friend.
Posted: Thu - May 31, 2007 at 07:01 AM