Smartboards

[Nomi]

I saw this a few days ago (thought it was here, guess not). Pretty cool technology, have multi-point touch screens that can be used to manipulate stuff like that. Sounds like it'd be crazy-expensive software backing them, though.

We have another real product called SmartBoards in our school, most classrooms have one in conjunction with a nice Epson projector. They're not exactly like that, hah, but they are huge touch-screen things. Essentially digital dry-erase boards and fancy-ass projector screens. Very handy and well-used by our teachers once they all went to training sessions to learn how to use them along with their computers.

[Drewbacca]

You're right. I'm sure this thing makes it impossible to use a normal keyboard.

Also... Apple owns this tech. Tablet Mac?

It seems to interact well, so whenever you need a keyboard it could simply display one, but I doubt the typical keyboard will be replaced anytime soon. It's tactility allows for fast typed communication.

This is awesome. I can see something like this being employed well in a tablet PC market.

[kedawa]

By the time this technology is mature and marketable, nobody will be using keyboards for much anyway.

Oh, and I can imagine some positively nasty implications for porn.

[Glitch]

I wanted one until I read that Apple owns it.

[kedawa]

Would you rather have MS or Dell controlling this?
I think patents are generally anachronistic and counterproductive, but I can't think of any company better suited to advance this technology.

[Glitch]

Would you rather have MS or Dell controlling this?
I think patents are generally anachronistic and counterproductive, but I can't think of any company better suited to advance this technology.

Maybe Microsoft wouldn't be the best to be the first ones to release this, but I hope they eventually copy the technology somewhere down the road

[g0zen]

Maybe Microsoft wouldn't be the best to be the first ones to release this, but I hope they eventually copy the technology somewhere down the road

Good, you can have the version with the blue screen of death you have to manually claw your way out of.

[Jester]

Apple has applied for patents on a tablet mac, applied for patents on all these multipoint gestures and bought a lot of accessabilty companies, touchscrren companies, and even Palm. Yeah apple is about to cause a pardigm shift in the way computers are used or fail in a spectatcualr explosion. Considering all the great things in computers used today were pioneered by apple (PCs, the current GUI interface, PDAs, and a shit load of others) I'm betting on the former.

Also, day one puchase, for real.

[animegirl]

That was really cool.