PSFK Touches The Microsoft Surface

PSFK had the chance to personally demo the Microsoft Surface last weekend. The multi-touch interface is cool and certainly worthy of the hype on YouTube; however, much remains to be seen about its actual application in real-life scenarios. First-off, the Surface is being launched as a commercial device, so you won’t be seeing this in your home anytime soon. Only 100 units will be released initially through commercial partners like The Sheraton.

I could definitely see myself playing around on the table while waiting for a friend in a hotel lobby. Ordering and paying for food through the table is neat, but features like mapping, purchasing music, or organizing photos beg for more. Because at the moment there’s not THAT MUCH more you can do on the Surface that you can’t do with a Wi-fi enabled phone, like the iphone (also multi-touch).

There’s obviously a lot of things you
can do on a large screen that you can’t do on a tiny one. Which also means an opportunity for both devices to work together
(i.e. dragging content form the surface to your iphone to take with you
on the go).

Just interesting that Apple’s strategy is to go with the smallest form-factor (the phone) while Microsoft’s is to go big (the table).

(BIG thanks to Shullovox for helping us with the video)

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Related: See Bll & Steve touching on some of these themes at the D5 conference