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Multi-Touch support in Windows 7

What Microsoft has officially shown of Windows 7 is not much and their extremely tight-lipped approach has led to some confusion and false rumors in the past. The D6 Conference took place yesterday and Microsoft, for the first time, demonstrated one of the features of Windows 7 that is most likely part of the retail version.

The demonstration was about the multi-touch support of Windows 7. The system used to demonstrate the feature was a Dell Latitude XL notebook running Windows 7. The multi-touch technology was borrowed from Microsoft Surface. The interface looks responsive and Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green is demonstrating various applications for the touch interface including photo manipulation, a mapping application and arts like drawing and playing music.

It does look fluid and nice but the real question is if this is a mass market feature. I would say it is not, at least not for many years to come. I can see that multi-touch makes a lot of sense for various groups but not for the masses. The real problem is probably that touch screens are not mainstream yet either, at least not when looking at desktop computers and notebooks.

It’s slowly making a way into the mobile market though and it could very well be that the technology will eventually take over the notebook market as well, but probably not in the next two years.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.

Author: , Wednesday May 28, 2008 -
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Responses so far:

  1. Thinker says:

    I wonder If they think about making this Windows usefull, not only full of funky features.

  2. GRTerrero says:

    Another example of style over function. Eye candy is nice. Functional eye candy is better. There are precious few environments where a touch screen is actually warranted or necessary; nearly all are workplace-related.

    Suffice it to say that the average home user has no desire to part with the mouse.

  3. ronig says:

    A text editor for for Windows 7 is releasing soon. Its StNotepad Touch with multi-touch gestures for all text editing actions like cut, copy, paste, delete, space, backspace, enter, tab, undo, redo, selectall etc… For more information visit http://stforms.net/stnotepad-touch/

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