A Microsoft blogger revealed yesterday that the next version of Windows ("Windows 7") will contain touch features with specific claims that the new features will 'blow away' the current touch features on the iPhone:
I will say that if you are impressed by the "touch features" in the iPhone, you'll be blown away by what's coming in Windows 7.
The blogger, Hilton Locke, is a Windows test engineer for the Tablet PC which explains his involvement with touch technologies. Microsoft has already integrated some touch features into Vista with support for current Tablet PCs as well as HP's TouchSmart PC, but it appears more advanced features will come with Windows 7. This successor to Windows Vista, however, is not expected to be released until 2010 at the earliest.
Even then, touch features would only be available to manufacturers who take advantage of the new features. Locke suggests that convincing manufacturers to adopt Windows Touch Technology has been difficult.
In May, Microsoft announced their Surface Computing initiative with the introduction of commercial multi-touch tables due in 2008.
Multitouch technologies have been a hot topic since the introduction of the Apple iPhone, with several patent applications indicating that Apple is heavily researching its use. The current incarnation of the iPhone supports two points of contact, allowing the user to zoom in and out using "pinch" and "reverse pinch" motions with two fingers. More advanced multi-touch possibilities include gestures and multi-purpose surfaces.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
