Touchy feely

The sense of amazement when I held my first iPhone 18 months ago—mouth agape, I realised why the American media had anointed the Varanasireturned Steve Jobs as the second coming of Christ. Only God could have come up with such a device, and that too after the iPod sent the music industry into a litigious tailspin.

Then after a couple of days, touch became ordinary. The iPhone was still a must-have phone, but when 60-year-old auntyji had one the fizz went flat. As any nerd will tell you, once the mainstream starts using a gadget, it becomes uncool. And anyway, the iPhone’s price is ridiculous (The iPod Touch makes far more sense).

But then touch started spreading— suddenly everyone was making a touch screen phone. The Taiwanese company HTC made the ‘Touch’ and they were followed by hordes of other Taiwanese and Korean companies, churning out products with incoherent names. And now Nokia has got in on the act with the well-priced 5800 XpressMusic (at Rs 20,000) and the N97, a device that could potentially kill its competition. Not to mention the HP ‘TouchSmart’ PC which, more than any other product, proves that 2009 is the year of touch.

Just as the computer made the typewriter obsolete for all but the most Luddite editors, touch will render the keyboard obsolete for all but the most hardcore gamers. It won’t just mean that I can drag and drop files across the screen—I’ll be able to just point and surf the Internet. In other words, it will realise Bill Gates’ vision of ‘Surface’ computing, the last project he started at Microsoft.

So far BMW has signed up— select American showrooms will soon feature Surface computers where you can sit at a touch screen table and drag and drop all the various permutations of colours and trims—what will that M3 look like in red with black leather upholstery and brushed aluminium lining? But the future of touch is so much broader. Imagine the future of gaming when touch is mainstream. Or pornography—the next Larry Flynt will have so many more avenues at his disposal. It might sound crass, but porn and gaming are two of the biggest drivers of Internet use. The mind boggles. Ansi Vanjoki, a senior suit at Nokia, told me about biochemical and mood sensors and gesture-based devices.

He said that in the not-sodistant future you will be able to point your phone at a restaurant, and its menu will pop up on your screen—a combination of positioning technology and the Internet. Click again and you get user reviews. Weirder still, your device could sense your mood, or whether you should take your blood sugar pills. And this isn’t Philip K. Dick territory, this is ongoing research.

So, where to now? If 2009 is touch, perhaps 2010 is when your device can tell that you’ve had too much to drink and will automatically call you a cab. Or detect that you’ve had a fight with your girlfriend and the babe in the nearest bar is single, available, and has broadly the same interests. This is a world where all the music I ever owned as a teenager fits into a memory card the size of my fingernail. Nothing is ridiculous anymore.