5 reasons touchscreen PCs may fail

Touchscreen technology is sweeping the consumer electronics market as technology brands hope to come up with the next iPhone, but these new toys could be little more than plenty of hype especially in the PC market.

Major phone and PC makers such as Nokia, Research in Motion Hewlett-Packard and Asustek have launched touchscreen-enabled products, aiming to ride the trend of what they expect to be the next big thing.

Microsoft's impending launch of its next-generation Windows 7 operating system is expected to give the budding technology a further boost, bringing a software that supports such capabilities into millions of home and office PCs.

But most consumers may not find touchscreen PCs very different from their usual laptop or desktop PCs, and the technology is unlikely to spread beyond mobile phones.

"I don't think it's going to be the next big thing by any means, but just more and more brands are going into it," said IDC analyst Jay Chou.

"The software's still in an embryonic stage, and until that changes, hopefully with Windows 7, it's still going to be a while more before we see things taking off."

Touchscreens, once only commonly found in supermarket checkout counters and airports and banks, jumped to the forefront of consumer technology thanks to Apple's popular iPhone, inspiring a whole list of knock-offs in the process.

The old-fashioned keyboard and mouse could still be the best way to use a PC, with user interaction habits notoriously hard to change, especially if there is a dearth of software support.

"I think it sounds like a lot of hype," said Gartner analyst Tracy Tsai. "It seems impractical to me for a person to use touchscreens on a computer, and when you're using a device so big, it really adds little value to the over all experience."

Touchscreen PCs have been around for a while now, but high costs and limited functionality have kept them to niche devices. These type of PCs make up less than 1 percent of all computers sold worldwide. While most analysts expect this figure to climb, few see it growing as quickly as some computer brands expect.

"The biggest question to me is how much value does a touchscreen add to your computer? Probably not very much, and if that's the case, why would I want to pay more money for such a computer," said iSuppli analyst Peter Lin.

High cost associated with touchscreens could set back the technology a few more years until prices come down, with the cost of manufacturing a panel and its required chips jumping manifold on a PC when compared to a smaller smartphone.

Specialist manufacturer Wintek estimates it costs about $10 to make a 3 inch touchscreen frequently used in smartphones, but said costs can increase exponentially when the size increases.

Touchscreen chip designer Elan Microelectronics, which counts Dell and HTC among its clients, estimates that adding a touchscreen to a desktop computer would increase its price by more than 10 percent.

"We've got to wait for the cost to come down a little before the kind of growth we're seeing right now in mobile phones can spread to computers," Elan's Chairman IH Yeh told Reuters at during the PC trade show Computex.

"Right now, I think it's still an issue whether or not consumers are willing to fork out an extra 10 percent for a touchscreen on their computers."

PC brands' previous forays into touchscreens have fizzled. With products such as the Tablet PC not living up to its initial hype when they were launched more than a decade ago.



(http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4763026.cms)

6 failed technology predictions by Bill Gates

The founder of the world's largest software company Microsoft Bill Gates is often looked upon for his vision. But then they also say, there's really nothing like perfection. So, all our venerable tech czar's forecasts too have not been flawless.

Many of the technology prophecies of the man who is often credited for ushering in the third wave of computing -- mainframe era, minicomputer era to personal computing era -- did miss the mark.

Here's looking into where all Gates went ‘wrong’.
Seems Bill Gates couldn't comprehend the pace at which the size of data will grow in the computing space. In 1981, Gates reportedly said that nobody would ever need more than 640 kilobytes of memory on their personal computer. Contrary to what Gates thought, most PCs today come with at least 2GB of memory.

However, in an interview to Bloomberg Business News in 1996, Gates refuted the quote. Here's an excerpt of what he said when asked about the (in)famous quote, "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

"The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known."

In a foreword to the OS/2 Programmer's Guide in 1987 Bill Gates wrote, "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly programme, of all times."

OS/2 was a computer operating system initially jointly developed by both Microsoft and IBM, and later developed by exclusively by IBM.

The OS though gained some ground in large industries like banking, insurance and telecommunications it, however, failed to make an impact among the home and SOHO users. The launch of Windows 95 completely stole the OSes thunder.

Contrary to what Gates wrote, Microsoft's own Windows operating systems today continue to power world's over 90 per cent desktops. OS/2 is no longer marketed by IBM, and IBM standard support for OS/2 was discontinued on 31 December 2006.

The problem of spam e-mail messages will be gone within two years, Bill Gates promised in January 2004.

Speaking at a session of the World Economic Forum, Gates said that the company was working on three ways to enable email users to keep spam out of their computers.

The first two, he said, would involve having computers reply automatically to any email messages from senders not known to that computer -- that is, not in the mail list of the email programme installed on the computer -- with a request to solve a problem that could be handled by a person but not by a computer.

The third way, which Gates said was likely to arrive later but be the long-term solution, would require that email messages sent by strangers come with postage attached, the equivalent of a postage stamp. It's been four-and-a-half years since then, and the spam menace only seems to be growing.

In 1983, Bill Gates said that the company "will never make a 32-bit operating system."

However, nine years later (in 1992), Microsoft released beta of its first 32 bit Windows NT. NT was the first full 32-bit version of Windows. The OSes consumer-oriented counterparts, Windows 3.1x and Windows 9x were 16-bit/32-bit hybrids.

In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, which featured new user interface, supported long file names and could automatically detect and configure installed hardware (plug and play). The OS could natively run 32-bit applications, and featured several technological improvements that increased its stability over Windows 3.1.

In 2005, Microsoft released 64-bit versions of Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003, now dubbed Windows XP Professional x64 and Windows Server 2003 x64. Currently, Microsoft's most popular XP packs both 32 and 64-bit versions. Less-popular Vista also comes in both versions.

In the year 2005, the tech czar amused the world with one another forecast that failed miserably. In an interview to a newspaper, Gates said "Blu-ray Disc is the last physical format there will ever be."

Here's quoting him, "Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way. It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that'd be fine. For us it's not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts.”

While Blu-Ray has beaten HD-DVD to death, its successor are on way including multi-layer discs (LS-R), 3D discs that may hold up to a terabyte of data and discs read by short wavelengths such as UV.
In the year 2001, Bill Gates had said that tablet PC would be the most popular form of PC sold in America.

At an event in Las Vegas, Gates showed a prototype Tablet PC and following year launched it. He said, "It's a PC that is virtually without limits and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."

However, Tablet PCs failed to make an impact. Only a few handful vendors market Tablet PCs. Also, they are still to take off as business devices.

Some time back, Gates again reiterated his faith in the Tablet PC form factor. He said that with better hardware and software, Tablet PCs have the potential to dominate over traditional laptop PCs.
Tablet PCs to be most popular'



(http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4775207.cms)