N-Trig bringing multi-touch technology to PCs

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 12 January 2009 11:30

Opinion and Analysis

Multi-touch technology, made famous by the Apple iPhone, is already available on PCs through HP’s TouchSmart tx2 notebook, and will come to many more notebook, tablet and desktop PC screens throughout 2009, well in time for Windows 7 and Linux.

Multi-touch technology has been a reality for consumers ever since Apple brought the iPhone and iPod Touch to market, letting us enlarge and shrink web pages and photos with a pinch or expand of a thumb and finger tip.

Although Asus brought multi-touch to its Eee PC series “touchpads” long before Apple brought it to the MacBook and MacBook Pro, and is also available HP’s all-in-one iMac-like desktop PCs through a driver update, 2009 is the year we’ll see multi-touch go mainstream in the world of PCs at large.

Microsoft’s Surface PC also brought multi-touch to the market at the same time Apple announced the iPhone, the Surface PC still isn’t available for everyday consumers to purchase and is mainly being marketed to hospitality businesses such as major hotels and restaurants.

While Apple’s enlarged touchpad surface on its MacBooks has broaden the use of multi-touch in the “PC” world, Apple hasn’t as yet seen fit to deliver touch screens on any of its computers beyond the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Tablet PCs such as the Dell Latitude XT and the Toshiba Portege M750 have enabled both pen and finger tip touch capabilities, but the M750 doesn’t actually do “multi-touch” although N-Trig says Dell has upgraded the Latitude XT to offer this feature.

N-Trig, an Israeli company working hard to make multi-touch a reality, calls the technology “Duo-Sense”, and is fighting against well-known tablet maker Wacom for market dominance. N-Trig describes its technology has “hands-on computing”.

N-Trig has just received a multi-million dollar investment from Microsoft to make multi-touch technology more wide-spread in preparation for the Windows 7 onslaught, theoretically due to arrive later this year in final form, with Windows 7 beta 1 now finally officially available.

HP’s TouchSmart tx2 notebook is another tablet notebook now on sale with Duo-Sense multi-touch technology, with N-Trig saying that “consumers have an interface that is more powerful and productive than any previously introduced.”

More touching information on N-Trig’s developments is on page 2, please read on!