Palm Inc.'s Pre smart phone and mobile operating system, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show Thursday, demonstrate how devices must become more human-friendly to meet people's needs, company officials and industry observers say.
The touch-sensitive Pre and its gesture-operated Palm WebOS, to launch exclusively on the Sprint network some time in the first half of 2009, are the latest among a range of products on display at the CES whose controls rely on normal human movement.
"It's clearly the future to be directly manipulating the information," Matias Duarte, Palm's senior director of user experience and human interface told The Globe and Mail. "It's clear to anyone who's used this type of interface."
The Pre's screen and face accept gestures such as the tap or flick of a finger, "multitouch" ones like a pinching motion, and others to activate or manage software and data, expanding on features familiar to users of Palm rival Apple Inc.'s iPhone.
Electronics manufacturers on display at the trade show appear to increasingly agree with Mr. Duarte's sentiment, offering a vast array of devices, ranging from cellphones to appliances to picture frames that employ some form of touch or gestural control.
"Last year at CES, all the talk was touchscreen, touchscreen, touchscreen," said Dan Saffer, principal of interaction design at Kicker Studio of San Francisco, Calif. "This year it's all over the place."
One obvious reason for the growing emphasis on touch is the iPhone's influence, and a sense of urgency among device manufacturers to stay current, Mr. Saffer said. "A lot of it is, 'We have to have touch right now.' "
The best-selling author - whose latest book, Designing Gestural Interfaces, was published last month - also sees a more compelling reason: "Manipulating things with fingers is something people have been doing for 100,000 years. It's much more natural than manipulating with a mouse or keyboard or stylus."
To wit, HP Inc.'s TouchSmart TX2 notebook computer uses multitouch gestures to let users quickly activate programs and functions. For example, tracing the letter "M" on the touch-sensitive screen launches the system's media software. The company is also exploring other ways it can use the technology.
"We have seen gestural interfaces. In general they are interesting but very hard to make intuitive," Jon Lax, a partner at Toronto interactive design firm Teehan + Lax, said in Las Vegas.
"It's hard to do," Mr. Duarte agreed. "The capacitive touch technology hasn't been able to have a screen behind it until recently, and the software to track where your finger is sucking electrons off that surface is very complex. It's not the type of software everybody can write. … There are very few companies who can pull it off."
Mr Saffer likened the broad adoption of touch interfaces to experimentation on the World Wide Web around 1995: "We're figuring out what it's good for and not good for."
Even so, Palm's move to a touchscreen and gestural interface was more like a sure bet than it was a true gamble, Mr. Saffer said.
"For Palm, it's a known quantity: They have Apple and LG and Samsung and others that show you can use touchscreens for mobile devices... It would have been weird for them not to use it," Mr. Saffer said. "It's going to be part of our future, definitely."
Canadians will have to wait for that future to carry Palm's next-generation device in their pockets or purses.
Asked for a timeline on the Pre's availability in Canada, Palm Inc. CEO Ed Colligan told The Globe and Mail: "I can't tell you that exactly. We do have a UMTS version and a CDMA version but either one of those could come to Canada depending on the carrier."
When pressed for details, he confirmed that discussions are under way.
"Of course we're talking to [Canadian]carriers," Mr. Colligan said.
"We certainly want to bring the product to Canada."