Touchscreen Netbooks To Shine At CES 2009

i4u writes "The new generation of netbooks debuting at CES 2009 will add touch and have twistable screens to use them in tablet or notebook style. Intel is set to introduce a new Classmate netbook with a twistable screen and touchscreen at the CES 2009. Back in October Asus said it was planning to introduce touchscreen Asus Eee netbooks in early 2009. Asus is exhibiting at the CES Unveiled pre-show that takes place on January 6th. Expect the Asus Eee Touch to be unveiled then. Gigabyte has outrun all of them with the Intel Atom-powered M912V that has been on the market for a while. Adding a touchscreen is rather easy. More difficult is to offer a touch-optimized UI. Let's see what the netbook vendors are going to invest on the software side."

Maemo

[ultrabot]

You guys should keep an eye out for what Nokia has in the pipeline for Maemo.

The "Hildon" desktop is optimized for touch usage, is open source and will be shipped with Ubuntu MID.

http://www.clutter-project.org/ will play an interesting role as well.

Re:Touchscreens

[gmuslera]

You are thinking in traditional desktops, a vertical screen, a keyboard, and space. But think in them as tablets, with keyboards that can be unfolded, and you'll get a larger version of the G1, or a touchscreen Kindle, or things like that.

I dont think this models will have multitouch, but would have been a nice addition too.

Re:Touchscreens

[jacksonyee]

I have actually found tablets useful in a variety of circumstances involving minimally trained workers and intuitive GUIs. They are extensively used in kiosk and POS interfaces for restaurants, front desks, and other such fields. Long before the iPhone came out, my Nokia N800 also ran very well with the touchscreen. You do need specially designed interfaces which are thumb and finger friendly, but once you have those interfaces built, it actually is quite intuitive to touch the screen to do something rather than to drag the mouse pointer all the way over. I'm not saying that you're going to use touchscreens for programming or server maintenance, but they do have their niche.

The one thing that has kept me out of the tablet market is the price. Why pay $900 (the best non-eBay price for the Gigabyte one above) when you can purchase an eeePC 900 for $350 with better stats? I hope these netbooks drive the price for touchscreens down a bit. I'd love to have a couple of 4" to 7" ones to play around with for Star Trek-style intercoms in the house.

Re:I too fail to see the point

[Repossessed]

Personally I want one because I can stuff them into my purse. A touchscreen is a big plus since the small keyboards and especially the mousepads are harder to use for me (a notebook in general thing). Price is more something to make it affordable than a feature, a bit higher isn't a dealbreaker.

Glad I held out so long now actually.