The Trouble With Touch Screens

Tactility is emerging as this year's major tech trend. For some reason, everyone seems preoccupied with touching. Touch screens, touch phones, touch tablets—touch everything. The trend was unmistakable at this year's CES, including the re-emergence of 3D entertainment, wherein you can almost "touch" the objects in the movie.

Touch has appeared before too, but it has always failed because the touch mechanism was just too dissociated from the user. The mouse itself was a touch item that wiggles as an icon on the screen. Eliminate the mouse from the equation, and you have today's touch standard.

While touch screens are hardly new, it was the iPhone that added the straw that broke that camel's back. The whole screen is a tableau, which can be moved as a whole. You make a gesture and the entire screen moves up, revealing more stuff underneath. You can flip though photos, pages, etc.

If this trend continues to play out as it is now, the mouse is dead. The mouse itself will have become just a flash in the pan. A fad. (For those readers who enjoy derisively quoting my 1984 column where I said the mouse was a sketchy new device, good luck staying on that track. How's that for irony?)

But take a look at traditional computer programs (i.e., spreadsheets, word processing, browsers, and DBMS systems), there are too many products that require the mouse. Microsoft Word is one of them. While I manage to use a Trackpoint keyboard rather than a mouse (so I can back away from the screen), most people will continue to use a mouse with the program for a long time to come. Spreadsheets can go either way, however, and can probably even incorporate voice commands.

As for the browser, nearly everyone with an iPhone or similar device will tell you that they can browse the Web easily, using their fingers as navigation tools. A lot of people are doing everything on their phone this way. So the question remains: will the PC itself become a touch device?

There are a number of things that the industry needs to overcome, if that's going to happen. The first is the grime factor. Touch screens need a grime-free surface that doesn't interface with visibility or sensitivity. I'm using a Nexus One Google phone. I caught a glimpse of the smudges in the right light, and it took a long time to wipe off all of those fingerprint smears. Big displays are already bad enough. They're magnets for dust and grime. Add human fingerprints, and all sorts of cleaning issues surface.

The other problem with the touch screen is pinpoint accuracy. You want to do all of your Photoshop editing with a Wacom or other tablet, but you can get by with a mouse in a pinch. But a finger? You can't edit photos with a finger as the pointing device. It's impractical. And while software can indeed "guess" what you're trying to do with a finger on a phone screen, this isn't the same as the accuracy required to edit photos.

So, before we all get carried away talking about touch on the desktop computer, let's be realistic—the fact is, touch has been re-introduced to take its rightful place as a useful mechanism for I/O, but all it has supplanted is the touchpad pen. When someone invents a surface that can withstand the scratching of a ballpoint pen, then and only then will I like the idea of idea of pen-based touch-sensitive displays.

In fact, I'm certain in hindsight that the little pen, which you had with the Palm Pilot and other devices, was the problem. I have blamed the dead smartphone business on Microsoft in the past, but the easily lost pen must have had as much to do with it. Whatever the case, the pen, thankfully, is dead.

The upcoming Apple tablet may give us more insight into the touch phenomenon by adding a new paradigm or two—though I think the thing will just be a giant iPod touch and not much more (what more can you really do?). That said, when Apple enters a moribund market category, it tends to show us some insightful new angle on the product, which ushers in new-found excitement. They'll probably do it again. Be prepared to be excited.