Microsoft to counter iTablet with Courier?

As I discovered on my adventure in Berlin at the beginning of the month, touch screens are definitely in this autumn and are appearing in a variety of formats ranging from handhelds such as the iPhone and iTouch to the 7in Toshiba JournE Touch and HP's new 10in Tablet on up to eReaders and beyond.

Toshiba Europe's general manager Thomas Teckentrup said in Berlin, "We belive these kinds of products will be the fastest selling kind in concumer electronics." Intended as second-string devices for use in the home, smallish touch tablets are the sorts of devices you would use to look up recipies on the net when you're in the kitchen, to check your electronic diary quickly or to dip into Facebook or YouTube.

I had a play with one in the murky light of an after-show cocktail party (see right). Once I'd got past the slow wireless connection and occasionally temperamental prototype operating system, I found the JournE Touch to be quite a pleasing experience. At this size, the touch interface is still intuitive - and appears to work pretty well, as it does in the Gizmodo video about the Microsoft Courier concept device above.

Smaller tablets are designed very much as media consuming devices rather than writing tools - and no matter what iPhone enthusiasts such as Kevin Salter say about on-screen keyboards, even at 7in they're still too finicky for me for data entry or work use. Note, for example, how the newer MS Courier device employs a stylus rather than finger.

But if you start to scale up the interface - for example in the lower Microsoft video (would you really drag such a hefty piece of kit around, much less manage to squeeze it onto the fold-down tray at your airplane seat??) - the on-screen reactions to your gestures become more ponderous, as I discovered when I laid my hands on a Microsoft Surface display for the first time (see above, left). This baby was doing service on Vodafone's behalf at IFA to present information about different models and contracts available and had a magnetic pull for on-lookers like me. But once I tried to use it, I found it difficult to position the elements where I wanted them and images that should have appeared side-by-side often overlapped each other irritatingly.

This Surface experience brings me to the final challenge of the touch interface - the user's own shortcomings at organising and displaying data. The Gizmodo vid shows the interactions of a really cool, well organised designer. But any tablet left in my care for more than a fortnight would begin to resemble my non-virtual desktop, which contains a jumble of random pieces of paper, office junk, Post-It notes and discarded cups of coffee. As linear and non-intuitive as hierarchical file interfaces may be, I actually find them helpful in organising my content so I can retrieve things quickly. Most of us have probably seen people who pile about 255 items on to their Windows desktops. Imagine what chaos would ensue if you handed them a powerful touch-screen display to play with?

For the moment, I reckon it's back to the drawing board for the human-computer interface experts. But keep the conceptual videos coming - in a few years, we'll all sit around our interactive 3D touchscreen displays and laugh at them like the robot aliens in the Smash TV advert.
___________________________
John Stokdyk, Technology editor