[LINK] surface

[Kim Davies]

Quoting Kim Holburn on Wednesday May 30, 2007:
|
| Slick, shiny, very shiny:
| http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Following up on this, I find myself unexpectedly in New York City today
after an air traffic control meltdown left me stranded overnight.
Incidentally, the first ever public showing of the Microsoft Surface was
being held today in my hotel, so I took a look.

I have to say I am pretty impressed with it, and it seems less
completely gimmicky than I initially thought. Whilst this will not be a
replacement for a computer, as a sort of lifestyle apps organiser it is
pretty cool. Definitely the best photo album I've ever seen, for
example.

I spoke with the Microsoft folks, and played around with one of the
two units they had for 5-10 mins. With respect to its ability to sync
and detect objects on the display, it has _no_ RFID capability. All of
the object interaction works with special infra-red printed tags. For
example, when you place a drinking glass down on the table it detects
it and allows functions like ordering another, but down this by reading
basically a bar-code printed on the bottom in infra-red ink.

Whilst they said RFID might ultimately be used, this is how they were
doing all the functions with credit cards, glassware and so forth.

I took some photos at put them up at Flickr:

    http://flickr.com/photos/kjd/sets/72157600330334715/

kim