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Originally Posted by Lotus Esprit
Not really as the MS Surface uses camera's to identify objects and you can manipulate multiple areas of the surface simultaneously as the with the iPad you are limited to one object at a time.
I think that the surface would work with all existing wireless, bluetooth devices as to have to have a special surface enabled device to work with it would definately hurt market penetration.
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You'd have to have some way for the wireless device to recognize that there is an incoming connection/transfer request from the surface device. If the mobile device had such an open OS environment that any bluetooth device such as the surface could arbitrarily send a group of pictures or pull pictures/movies off the mobile with no initial user interaction (input a PIN, etc.), can you imagine the security nightmare that would be on that mobile phone? Ultimately, such functionality cannot be as easy as shown in the mockup video without creating enormous security holes in your mobile device.
Multiple simultaneous hand gestures is merely an extension of current multi-touch technology; it hasn't yet made its way mainstream just because the devices haven't been big enough to make use of it. There's no
physical limit right now on simultaneous gestures on the Android, iPad, etc.; it's merely a matter of programming the OS to know what to do with it and putting enough CPU horsepower to make it look smooth.
I don't really see this surface thing as being a high priority in current computing trends, though, so if MS is focusing their development teams on this sort of thing, I think they're making a huge mistake. Current computer development is trending away from the traditional desktop-style computer (which is effectively all this MS Surface thing is - when you get past the eye-candy, it's just a desktop computer with a big screen and a multi-touch UI) and on toward more personalized and portable devices like Androids, iPhones, Slates, and iPads. These devices easily meet the computing needs of 90% of the typical consumer public: how many people really need the horsepower of two Core i7's and 8G RAM with a 2TB hard drive and a 27 inch screen just to check Facebook? Profit margins on PCs are already minimal at best, and that marketplace situation is only going to get worse, which is what is driving companies like HP and Apple into the tablet market where margins are much wider and can probably remain sustainable for several more years. In the current and near-future computer marketplace, I doubt a hugely-expensive table-sized surface computer would sell very well. The enormous screen (what would be the cost of a 40-inch 130 to 160 PPI LCD monitor?? Yikes!), all the cameras you mentioned, the processing needs with associated RAM requirements to make that thing work smoothly: this would not be a typical consumer device by any stretch of the imagination.