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[UncleUB]

Here's the latest offering from Dell,

Just a touch screen unit and nothing else,no k/b or mouse.

Is this going to be the future of PC's?


http://tinyurl.com/qheot2

[Weaver]

Answer - "no".

[Weaver]

:-)

We have real keyboards for a reason. And touch screens are nice but get greasy and disgusting with finger marks. And for a vertical display, your arm falls off after a short while if you're using it a lot. I was here twenty years ago, in a former life... :-)

Touch screens can also muck up light transmission/image quality if you're not careful. And can need calibrating...

For laptops/tablets/mobile devices/coffee tables the usability-need-benefit equation is very different IMO.

[sevenlayermuddle]

We have real keyboards for a reason. And touch screens are nice but get greasy and disgusting with finger marks. And for a vertical display, your arm falls off after a short while if you're using it a lot. I was here twenty years ago, in a former life... :-)

Couldn't agree more. 

Bad posture at traditional keyboards & screens is blamed for a large number of bodily ailments like wrist injury,  back pain, neck pain, headcaches and many more.   Now, slouching over a keyboard may be bad and unnatural enough, but holding an arm out, hand up, prodding at a screen - is it just me, or does that seem even more unnatural?  I'd like to think they'd studied that aspect.   In the same way as I'd like to think that politicians are honest, and that bankers look after their customers' interests.

[roseway]

Touch screens have many good uses, but for a desktop PC they would be my absolutely last choice, for the reasons mentioned above. They are quite useful in kiosk applications (like paying for your goods in Argos for example) and I expect they have a place in visual presentations and similar things, but these are mainly situations where you are standing up, not sitting down bending forward to reach the screen.

[jazz]

I see on the details that they do supply a wireless mouse and keyboard as standard with the package - the option seems to be whether your use them or not.  Touch screen doesn't sound the way to go to me but the machine does look fairly classy as an entertainment/picture viewing system.

[jid]

Not for me I don't think

I like my mouse and keyboard 

[UncleUB]

Well everyone gives it a thumbs down (including me).

So I wonder what kind of pc user they are targeting ?

[Imagine.]

it looks good but looking at the hardware doesn't seem very "powerful" at all i mean the quad core is great but the graphics are a bit shifty a GeForce 9400 hardly cuts it nowadays and at the current price its hardly appealing is it only good point about it i can think of is the touch screen . But then again im looking at this from a gamers point of view 

[Weaver]

Despite what I wrote earlier, touch screens are great in some applications. You should be using a stylus not a finger, but this rules out some of the new two-touch gestures such as the resize/draw bounding rectangle/select gesture or whatever its called. But using fingers on touchscreens is silly because the screen gets filthy and fingers are too big for pointing at small displays and fingers+hands cover up a lot of what you are trying to look at while you're pointing.

The right thing to do will probably be to do gestures with accelerometers (like Wii) and a pointer symbol. Or do 3d spatial finger position tracking. Or do eyetracking and simply look at the display. Or who knows.

But this is old stuff, from 20 years ago, that was rejected back then for good reasons IMO.

IMHO this stuff is a perfect example of "stuff that wows stupid marketing people IN A DEMO" but is actually useless and wearing in real use. Designers should be thinking about real usage and be contemplating stuff that is very radical and new by now, not 'discovering' that which is old and dull.

[stevie]

Touch screens are ok for some applications, like in Kiosks as stated.

We fit them to some of our new machines, but the commissioning Engineers or the Service Engineers (Me) fit mouses as well, we fit keyboards as standard.

Touch screens IMHO opinion for real world stuff, ie desktops, laptops are a waste of time.

Ok for large screen demos & as also stated for Idiots who buy stuff for their company who in reality have no idea about actual usage.

The real leap forward will be voice control, that actually works in real time & gets everything correct 99.99% of the time, something like "HAL" in 2001 or the gadget in Blade Runner & a few other Sci Fi films/series....I know voice recognition is out there but true voice control isn`t just yet...

Touch screens are fine on PDA/Sat Navs & the like.

In much the same way as Sat Navs are good they aren`t that good....Yet.