Look what’s surfaced

This week I was excited. In fact, the last time I was this excited furniture got broken! The cause of all this elation was the arrival of a Microsoft Surface table at our London LBi office.

 Having now had some hands on experience with the device I can tell you that it does not disappoint and easily falls into the ‘really cool’ category.

The table comes with lots of small demo applications which allow you to experience the multi-touch interface and it’s amazing just how intuitive the whole environment is. There is definitely no time required to adjust to the experience (unlike the very first time you ever used a mouse for those of you who can remember a pre-mouse era). The bundled applications include a multiplayer pong game, photo sorting, finger painting, piano playing applications, in-fact a whole host of widgets that encourage you to put both your hands on the table and start pushing, pulling, pinching and prodding.

Each application is very slick and looks like the type of application interfaces you see in sci-fi movies. By the time you’ve finished playing with the demos you really feel like the future has arrived.
Whilst still awash with euphoria I started to wonder how Surface works and how you can program it. Fabrizio who is our lucky software engineer with the task of getting under the hood kindly showed me some code he was working on and yes it was the all too familiar .Net programming framework. Unlike Apple who has created ‘Objective C’ for their iPhone, Microsoft have stuck with a language that millions of developers know and love; 1 nil to Microsoft I think.

After I had finished messing with the Surface I went home. Time passed as did the warm happy feeling of my ‘new gadget’ fix. Questions then started coming into my head:

Why is it a table? Like most Microsoft hardware it is bulky and ugly and they can’t get it any smaller so they stick it in a big box and make a ‘feature’ out of it by calling it a table.

Can we wall mount it? Apparently no, the bulbs will break.

What are its practical applications? Well, restaurants and education of course! Hmmm it is now beginning to sound contrived. It reminds me of a number of failed gadgets which have no real world use or not enough originality to set them apart; Segway, Nokia NGage, Sony Mini Discs, soda-streams etc

I am now left with the feeling that the multitouch experience is a beautiful thing but the Microsoft Surface Table is not. I can’t help but think that if Apple had created ‘Surface’ it would 5mm thick and flexible so you could roll it up and stick it in a tube, the device itself would be highly desirable in the same way as the user experience it provides.

Anyway, can’t wait to see what cool gadget we get next ; please let it be a Lockheed Martin wearable display.