Acer T230H

Despite the fact that touchscreens have been around for decades it is only now with the release of Windows 7, which is the first Microsoft operating system to fully support the technology, that they look to set to gain the support needed to break into the mainstream PC market.

The T230H touchscreen LCD from Acer is the first such monitor to hit New Zealand’s shores, and it fully supports all the touch qualities of Windows 7 such as the ability to rotate images, flip pages, pinch-zoom, draw and generally anything else you can normally do with mouse, all on the multi-touch surface of the screen.

At $849, the 23-inch, 16:9 screen is over twice the price of most non-touchscreen panels of similar size, but it does boast some impressive specs like 80,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 1,920 x 1,080 full HD resolution, 2ms response time, 300 nits brightness and HDMI input.

Users of the Apple iPhone and iPod touch will be familiar with most of the gestures which Windows 7 supports out of the box such as scrolling, zooming, and rotating images, and the simplicity of touchscreen technology means anyone else will be able to master the basics in a matter of minutes.

So, what can you use the touchscreen for, exactly? Well, any application that runs in Windows 7 will respond to touch commands as if they were mouse clicks, but unfortunately there just isn’t any software available right now which is designed to fully utilise touchscreen capabilities.

Microsoft has, however, released a Touch Pack for Windows 7, which is a collection of small applications designed to demonstrate the potential that this technology has. One of these apps, called Microsoft Surface Globe, displays a 3D version of the world with satellite imagery mapped onto it. You can spin the globe around and zoom in, and you can even fly around 3D buildings in certain cities, all with your fingertips.

There is also a picture viewer which you can use to shuffle and toss around images as if they were photos sitting on your coffee table; a lagoon complete with fish that you can splash around and make ripples in; a clever little physics game where you have to move objects around to complete a puzzle; a futuristic air-hockey game; and a garden pond game where you have to shunt little origami boats around to complete goals.

None of these apps justify buying the screen in the first place, but they do give you a glimpse of what the possibilities are.

One puzzling aspect of the screen itself is its hi-gloss finish. Anyone who has used a laptop or LCD TV with a glossy screen knows what fingerprint-mongers they are, which means the screen looks grubby as heck after just a few minutes use. It also means that the slightest trace of sweat on your fingertips has the same effect as a handbrake when you’re dragging your finger across the screen. This can all be avoided by using a pen or stylus for performing gestures, but there’s something about prodding a screen that costs the thick end of a thousand bucks with sharp objects which just doesn’t seem right.

We’re not quite sure who would want to buy one of these right now. There could be some cool commercial uses for the screen if you want to impress your customers, but we don’t see many home users clamouring to get one.

At the end of the day, now that the technology is widely supported thanks to Microsoft we’re sure someone is working on that killer app that will make us all want one. Here’s hoping that happens soon.