Neat…
Last November, in the USA, Dell introduced their new Studio 17 with Mutli-Touch, the link is below
Now, just 2 months or so later, it is now available on the Australian website for just ~$360.00 extra. Actually, it’s $359.70 (the 1600×900 N-Trig DuoSense mulit-touch screen) – $41.80 (Only available with the “Black Chainlink for Touch Display” colour option, which is $41 cheaper than the normal colours) = $317.90 extra, but… yeah.
About the touch screen: N-trig is an international company which develops touch screen solutions for OEMs (e.g. Dell, HP, Acer, Samsung, LG, etc.). Their best known product (recently) is their DuoSense digitizer, a sensor unit that can be easily integrated over the existing screen. It is a capacitive based sensor (like that of the iPod click wheel, iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad screen and many of the newer, more expensive touch screen mobiles like the Nokia X6), meaning it detects touch input by the change of the electromagnetic field created by the sensor. When you touch the screen with a compatible object (i.e. your finger), you disturb the e-m field, allowing the sensor to detect where you have touched. N-trig have also designed a ‘special’ electro-static pen which can also work on the screen (traditional styluses normally don’t work on a capacitive screen).
With N-trig’s (an Israeli based company) claim that their DuoSense technology has en enormous amount of accuracy, as well maintaining the screen’s transparency (so the image isn’t made duller with the touch technology being laid over the top), they also say that their digitizer (the touch interpreter/sensor) is the fastest one on the market (sure hope it is), and it includes their powerful ‘Palm rejection’ technology, which “recognises unintentional touches” (meaning it knows when you didn’t want to touch the screen) when using the pen or writing normally, which is supposed to stop your palm being counted as a finger when you’re working on it (you know how your palm rests on the page when you write? That’s what I mean). I hope it helps push forward multi-touch technology on computers in the future.
I’ll point out though that I still believe the Keyboard and Mouse to be highly important, and useful, input methods, especially for games. I just reckon that a combination of multi-touch and the tradition keyboard and mouse is the best way to go now (unless they come up with some more massively amazing and useful input method, then I’d have to reconsider, although I have the feeling that the Mouse and Keyboard will still be the important and useful).
It’s called a game controller Antony, and it was made for a particular reason.