MS Surface - yours for only £10k

yeah made me laugh too, glad you liked it.

I am just baffled by this thing. Granted it is a cool gadget, but in all honesty, I fail to see any benefit. It seems much more limited in use than a regular PC (I may be shortsighted - seems to be one giant "iphone hub" and nothing more really) and launching such a product, who's usefuleness one could argue, at £10k in today's market seems absurd. Who would actually buy/need this, except maybe a museum?
 
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We had a microsoft partener bring one of these to a talk last week.

Got to have quite a good play with it. It works very well, i wasnt expecting it to be anywhere near as good as it was.

Its essentially a medium spec desktop running vista, there is then a shell over the top which prohibits general user access to the OS - they only get at what the owner wants.
touch panle is incredible, it can detect about 90 simultaneous touches at the moment (uses 5 IR cameras pointed up from underneath to detec and track the touch. you can tag items with binary logos, which the camera can then log and store as a recocnised item.

Think i should poijnt out that this is primarily a Point Of Sale console, more than a home user table.

They've benn installed all over the world in varios bars and restraunt, there are some in a las vegas casino etc etc

They've already started putting them out in this country - barclays bank have got some for use (think its currently only in the new branch in central london- forget exactly where!)

But they've also trialed them in the AV retail market, makes it very easy for a salesman to present information and explain packages/different setups. MS are claiming it incresed closure rates by 50%

May be seeing more than you think over the next few years.
 
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I've made one of these for my 4th year project, Total cost of ours is about £1000max. Obviously ours doesn't have the the same software (I'm working on that at the moment).

The whole "what's the point" discussion is quite valid, as its defiantly not useful as a traditional PC, apps designed with WIMP in mind just don't work well. It's main use if multi-user environments with GUIs designed from the ground up with multitouch in mind.
 
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