Touching is Good

Today Apple let loose a barrage of news, possibly most exciting of which for the masses is the new i-Pod Touchwhich is essentially an i-Phone – phone + more music. Not content to leave the day at that, the company also unveiled a new i-Pod Nano now as a squat device with a small screen on it, and possibly most interesting to me they decided to drop the 4gb i-Phones and lower the price of the 8gb ones to $399!

My Verizon contract runs out in approximately one month, and I have been stewing for several weeks about what I am going to do. I look through Verizon’s inventory of phones and nothing tickles me in the right way, even before I knew anything about Apples gorgeous toy. They’ve re-released the Chocolate phone, a device which appeals to me very little to begin with, and it seems like it’s down hill from there with exception for only (maybe) the En-V. Now it definitely seems like Apple has sealed the deal, saving me $200 full dollars now that I’ve been patient and waited for the deliciousness. Now before you go off on a rant, I know that they’re just going to come out with something newer and better in a few months anyway, or lower the price even more, but my phone contract is running out so I’m most likely just going to jump in now while the jumping is good.

Did the i-Phone open up a chasm to another dimension with its touch screen interface? Certainly they existed before a few months ago, they were even much more wide spread then many people probably cared to notice, restaurants and other service industries have been using touch screens for more then seven years now. Even PDA’s have been mainstream for a long time, but they clung to the last vestiges of man-utensil-computer interaction with their spiffy stylus pens and could never openly embrace direct man-to-CPU contact lest they scare away the less-hardcore users. The release of the next gen of i-Pod has only solidified an idea that I had been pondering for a while, the touch-screen is the new “it” thing to have. The age of hiding from our computers behind keyboards and mice appears to be coming to an end, which makes me wonder if soon there will be an explosion (possibly only a small one) of desktop computer touch screens out in the mass market. Are they already out there, simply waiting to proudly stand on the prominent shelves in Best Buys everywhere?

Nintendo has had excellent foresight in this matter, first releasing the DS which holds the majority of the handheld market (though the PSP has still sold over 22 million units, twice the number of Wiis or 360’s out there even now) by allowing a new level of interaction for the player. The DS was, however, still restricted to the stylus kind of interface and did not allow players many new ways of playing aside from tapping, scribbling, and drawing. The DS did have one unique little token, the microphone which was built in not only served to pick up and recognize voice but also as an air sensor for a player to blow into, something that as far as I have seen is entirely new amongst gaming. They easily continued this trend obviously with the Wii, which is probably the closest thing to a touch-screen entertainment system that really makes sense, because no one wants to actually get up and touch their TV the whole time they’re playing. I would not rule out touch screen televisions now that I’ve said that, with the option opened up who knows what kinds of features we could integrate into our television and video-gaming experiences.

A major set-back to touch screen technology is the unavoidable fact that it’s much less precise than other forms, you cannot type as quickly on a touch screen as you can on keyboard (though that is mostly due to size right now), and you definitely cannot point on a screen as precisely, quickly, or accurately as you can with a stylus or a mouse. Why, then, do we crave such intimate connection to machines? My best answer is that we have grown so attached to computers that we are now seeking, quite literally, a closer relationship with them. It is no longer satisfying or engaging enough to zoom a picture on a screen with a magnifying glass icon, now we must use our hands to enlarge or shrink the picture. Another theory is that computers are simply adapting to fill the voids that exist in life. Years ago I used to be able to riffle through cd’s in a store and look for random music I liked, but in the age of i-Tunes and DRM that feeling seemed lost, until the i-Phone came along with a nice music interface reminiscent of flipping through a pile of records, cd’s, or whatever it is that gives you that warm feeling inside.

Computers are adapting, whether it is because of the people physically designing and building them or the market as a mammoth beast driving them in that direction, they have evolved and adapted and will continue to do so seemingly to no end. In the 90’s we all believed virtual reality was the not-so-distant answer, and that fizzled into nothing. Will the next generation of interaction, touch-screens and physical connections, power through and become the new standard or will the hardware of mice and keyboards evolve in some new way and overtake them? I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to find out.