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* Photo: Mauricio Alejo * The Pre, Palm's ridiculously slick new mobile phone, stole the show at CES this year. Good looks helped, but mainly it was the Pre's iPhone-like touchscreen technology that wowed the industry crowd. Sure, the Pre has a built-in keyboard, but all anyone wanted to do was drag their fingers along the screen and make magic happen: pop windows open, scroll through sites, fling the contact list to the bottom of the display. The gestures were intuitive, fun, and basically copies of Apple's.
Two weeks later, Apple COO Tim Cook expressed his irritation (without directly naming Palm) to analysts on a conference call: "We will not stand for having our IP ripped off, and we'll use whatever weapons we have at our disposal. I don't know that I can be clearer than that."
Them there are fighting words. Suddenly, Apple and other tech companies are preparing to slug it out over gestures that humans have been making since we developed opposable digits. Patents and patent applications by Apple, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and others describe moves in language you might hear at a thumb-wrestling match: the pinch, the de-pinch, the flick, the perpendicular-moving breach (aka the check mark). Gesture-based computing is about to go mainstream, and the battle to define how we navigate the digital world has begun. It's going to be ugly—and potentially fatal to the movement.
Since the birth of the PC, companies sought a way to ditch the keyboard, a Moore's-law-ignoring, design-constraining anachronism tethered to increasingly powerful machines. But early attempts at touch were buggy and clumsy (forcing users to, say, learn Palm's Graffiti handwriting language or cope with input-challenged tablet PCs). So we stuck with keyboards and mice, control-X'ing, control-S'ing, and double-clicking away. Then came the Wii and the iPhone, and suddenly the gesture era was upon us.
Now that sensors are getting cheaper, touch and movement control are everywhere. Everyone has a killer gesture. The just-debuted Touch Pro2 mobile by HTC, for example, turns on its speaker when you flip the phone over and lay it down. Nokia is devising ways to trip functions simply by waving your hand in front of the screen. Although only 5 percent of phones have touchscreens today, that should increase to nearly 30 percent by 2013, according to research firm StrategyAnalytics.
In the PC market, where the search for growth is desperate, gesture-based computing is seen as a savior. HP considers it an entrée to the third world, where many languages don't map well to a standard keyboard. The company's India team recently finished a seven-city tour in which engineers, hoping to learn what to incorporate into devices, did nothing but watch how locals touch and gesture to one another. And Microsoft is making multitouch a vital part of Windows 7. Its researchers learned that when people deal with devices tactilely, they tend to anthropomorphize them—and that means more time spent on Microsoft products. "In a usability test, we noticed that folks were lingering," says Ian LeGrow, Microsoft's top Windows user-interface manager. "They wanted to keep interacting with the PCs after the tests were done."
But studies show that consumers are also just as likely to abandon a device if the gestures aren't intuitive, which has everyone in a bind. One of the strengths of the keyboard is that it's familiar. People who switch from PC to Mac don't have to relearn how to type. With multitouch, the need for standards is even greater. At least with keyboards, the buttons are there; the new touch devices lack visual clues, and trying to manipulate them can feel hopeless. "People have to get it right out of the box," says Nokia researcher Roope Takala. "Otherwise, they'll give up after two or three tries."
In the end, Palm and Apple will come to some agreement (in court or out) on how to share multitouch. But the language has to be universal for it to be adopted. Otherwise, consumers are going to give all these devices one gesture: a single raised finger.
Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com) wrote about the need for transparency on Wall Street in issue 17.03.
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