The Surface has been around since 2007, but the new and improved SUR40 is a much more usable device. Microsoft and Samsung were showing off the new touch-capable table in NYC today, and I was lucky enough to get up close and personal with it.

The specs in and of themselves are impressive: 40-inch 50-point multitouch screen with a 1080×1920 resolution, AMD processors, 1GB of memory dedicated entirely to graphics, a 4-inch profile, and a host of USB/HDMI ports. It’s the computer you always wanted, save for the fact that it looks like a kitchen table and costs about $9,000.

But chances are this won’t end up in your living room. Instead, it’ll show up in your favorite retail store, at a hotel, or at the mall. That’s because this device has been specially engineered for that environment, and the needs presented within it.

That is where PixelSense comes into play. It’s an engineering technique that basically replaces the original five cameras on the Surface with hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny sensors embedded straight into the LCD panel. That means it’s no longer the conductivity of your finger directing the screen, but the screen reading your movements.

In fact, the screen sees you even as your hand hovers over the table; Microsoft has simply told it not to recognize that.

Another cool feature of this PixelSense-equipped screen is that it can detect the orientation of your finger. That means that if I want to drag an image of some shoes I’m interested in over to my corner of the Surface, the screen immediately recognizes the direction of my finger (and thus, which direction I happen to be facing) and can realign the image to face me.

But that’s just a tiny piece of what makes this thing awesome. Since the screen reads everything (and not just conductive energy), it can also handle real world objects. Oh, and it can tell which way they’re facing thanks to a small optical tag located on the bottom of the object.

Before I delve into it, just think about the retail implementations of this. Here’s one I didn’t see in action but thought would be cool:

You walk into a Foot Locker and see a pair of Nikes that are calling out to you. The only problem is that they only have them in all white and you know you’ll scuff them up. You’d prefer something a bit louder. Perhaps a royal blue?

Plop the shoe down on the Surface where a unique optical tag on the sole of the shoe can be read. Instantly you’re in Nike ID, customizing that same pair of shoes into what you want them to be.

As it does with just about any product, the Surface will generate a Microsoft tag for your shoes that can be read by your smartphone, which can then take you to a purchasing site or be saved for girlfriend’s input.

The new SUR40 is made with Gorilla Glass and is also spill resistant, using drains around the bezel to keep any spilled liquids out of the internals. Again, perfect for retail. What’s interesting is even a few drops of water are read by the Surface thanks to PixelSense.

In short, it’s all about interacting in a new way with the brands you enjoy. I saw a few different implementations of it and found myself wishing that all shopping was done this way.

For example, FujiFilm has a deal in place in Australia (but was too shy to name the retailer just yet) where the Surface can be used to make picture books. Just plug in your USB, SD card, or the like, and your pictures are then uploaded to the device (no worries, they’re never saved to the hard drive). From there, you can drag, drop, customize, add text, and finally print out a receipt to be taken to the front counter.

Absolut Vodka also has a Surface-friendly app, though no one was that clear on whether or not it’ll be live in any venues anytime soon. Still, the app lets you be the DJ, and offers different mixed drinks based on the music you’re playing. Again, you can whip out your phone to read the tag matching this or that drink and save the recipe straight to your phone.

Kia has an app that works in a very similar way to my imagined Foot Locker/Nike app, which will let you customize the vehicle (paint job, interior colors, rims, entertainment system, etc.) while you’re in a dealership.

If high-end makeup is your thing, you’ll also be excited to learn that Neiman Marcus’ luxury beauty brand Le Métier de Beauté is using the SUR40 as a consultation table in the coming months. You can customize shades of certain eye shadow or blushes which appear on-screen as soon as the actual product is placed on the table, save the “recipe” of your end-result to your phone, along with a picture of yourself post-makeover. That way you can go back home, apply the makeup yourself, and still look like you walked out of the salon.

Two of my favorites mostly concern information, and the transference of information.

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), for example, created an app that lets you work out your finances, savings, and any other special offers from the bank right on the Surface. That way you aren’t relying on the employee to give you information that is in your best interest, but can actually see the effects of whatever change you might be making to your account right in front of you. Full transparency is something the banking industry could use a hearty helping of, and also something that would probably lead more bank users to participate in programs and special offers.

Microsoft also showed me an app that will map out the inside of an airport and show you various retailers and food vendors in your terminal. The app not only shows special deals and offers from said vendors, but gives you the time it takes to walk there so you don’t miss your flight.

Of course, the possibilities are endless. If you have a loyalty or member card at a certain retailer, you can use that on the Surface to bring up your information and see if you have any rewards points to go towards a purchase, or take a look at which products are on sale. Companies can also choose to use the SUR40 for product comparisons, removing the employees and all of their “sell-more” mentalities from the purchasing decision.

Performance-wise I didn’t see any hiccups or issues at all, and I’d honestly love to have one of these in my living room as a coffee table. Sadly, I’m about $8,400 short. (The SUR40 costs $8,400.) Luckily, it’s available and shipping now so if you’ve got the dough it can be yours for the buying. If not, it’ll still be a lovely new technology to have in stores, train stations, and the like, and I can’t wait to see this thing roll out big time.

If you’re wondering why we didn’t stop by to test out the Samsung SUR40 touch-table, AKA the Surface 2.0, during CES, there’s a good reason: we did that last year. The device, while impressive, isn’t exactly new. But as it has little in the way of competition — the Surface is the nonpareil of touch tables — they probably didn’t feel they needed to get it out in any kind of hurry.

The device, which costs $8400 and ships this month, must be quite a bit more attractive than the original to companies eager to spruce up their public spaces. The old Surface was kind of a chunk, and the limited resolution was no help, either. Oh, and the price. The new Surface beats it handily in every respect. It’s flatter, lighter, wall-mountable, and 1080p.

As we learned last year, the SUR40 also has what they call PixelSense, tiny sensors built in between the pixels of the image that can detect light. It’s through these, not capacitive or resistive sensors, that your touches are detected. This also means it can read things like QR codes, whole-hand gestures, and text.

Here’s our hands-on from last CES:

One problem I see is that companies aren’t always willing to do what it takes to make a Surface effective. When we were at CES, we passed countless touchscreens and displays showing menus, promotions, local info, and so on. They were all pretty terrible: no multitouch, buggy and unresponsive UIs, and kind of useless info. But doubtless they cost only a fraction of what a Surface cost. Are restaurants and hotels going to be satisfied with this level of quality? Many, I fear, will be. To truly take advantage of what the Surface 2.0 has to offer, it will take thousands of dollars in development and training. Imagine checking in to your hotel via Surface, or ordering food on it. Great! But not easy.

Fortunately the development community for Surface has been around for a long time and is serious about what they do. I got a chance to hang out with a few developers, and it seemed to me that the capabilities of the thing are huge, but only for those dedicated to it.

At all events, the device should ship soon, and it might be just the thing to make your lobby or waiting area more interesting. You can pre-order or find out more at Samsung’s Surface page.

Fond as we are of Microsoft’s touchscreen Surface table and all of the kooky things people have made it do, its replacement has come one step closer to seeing the light of day. Samsung and Microsoft have just announced that the next-generation Surface table, the SUR40, is now available for preorder in over 23 countries.

One of the first things you notice about the SUR40 is how much slimmer it is than the Microsoft’s original Surface. Gone is the massive pedestal that housed the Surface’s internals — the SUR40 manages to squeeze an Athlon X2 processor and the rest of its components flush against the 40-inch multi-touch display.

Samsung was able to trim so much cruft from the Surface’s body because the inclusion of Microsoft’s PixelSense technology allowed them to axe the 5-camera array that powered the original. PixelSense allows the SUR40′s LCD panel to essentially “see” objects, movements, and touch gestures — check the video below to see it in action. On top of that, the SUR40 is also capable of tracking up to 50 touch points simultaneously, which sounds like a good time in my book.

Businesses found the original Surface a novel way to have their customers interact with rich content, leading to early partnerships with companies like Harrah’s, T-Mobile, and Starwood Hotels. Samsung and Microsoft seem to be targetting new models to the same sort of audience, but there’s nothing that says you can’t for your own little commercial enterprise.

If the thought of living without one of these things in your life is just too much to bear, you can reserve one for around $8,400. Samsung and Microsoft still haven’t pinned down a release date though, so just be careful — you may be waiting left waiting for a little while yet.

Despite being the only TechCrunch writer in Seattle, I don’t get out to Microsoft nearly as much as one might expect. The fact is it’s on the other side of a big lake and getting there usually involves a lot of traffic. But when I get an invite like I did recently, to join a sort of unofficial Surface developers’ club for a meeting, it’s hard to say no. The promise of free pizza had nothing to do with my enthusiasm. I like the Surface.

So it was that I got to join a group of developers from all around Microsoft as they spitballed ideas, compared new projects, and developed a new feature as I watched. They didn’t initiate me into the mysteries of the device or swear me to secrecy regarding plans of world domination, but I got to see some cool new Surface apps and contribute to the development of a new feature. Also, they had Alaskan Amber.

I arrived at the Microsoft campus (one of them, anyway) around 6, and after wandering fruitlessly for a short time (navigating corporate architecture isn’t my strong suit) I was captured and conducted to a conference room where a dozen people or so were arrayed around tables as if for a weekly meeting. After some introductions, the purpose of this secret society was explained.

It turns out that some people really just love working with the Surface. So much so that they can’t get enough during working hours! So this recurring event was created, with pizza and refreshments, to make it worth the extra time being put in. There were people from gaming, Windows, Kinect, marketing, a real cross section of Microsoft life.

I was then given a short tour of some things that people in the group had developed in their spare time, for the most part on their own. A simple but versatile pamphlet presentation app, a sort of paperless coffee table, spoke to the Surface’s tragically commercial-only availability:

But one developer, like myself a fan of “shmups,” had put together a rudimentary but promising shooter using real-life tokens to control your ships. You might remember some time back when we went to see a Dungeons and Dragons game for the Surface, complete with figurines, spells, and kobolds. As you can see below and at the top of this article, this game is a bit more frenetic.

The dots emanate from various locations and it’s your job to navigate them. You move your ship around, point it where you want to shoot, and so on. Having a physical item to play with helps address the lack of tactility that occasionally makes touchscreen games so unsatisfying.

Last was an interesting fusion of two innovative Microsoft products: the Surface and the Kinect. This is a sort of “morning briefing” app that is meant to run on your living room’s idle TV, which one can imagine may some day have a touch panel and depth sensing camera built in. Today it was an upright Surface 2.0 and a stock Kinect:

You always see people in movies set in the future talking to their computers, controlling them with a gesture, and so on. This is a small-scale attempt at something like that that people might actually use. When you’re at a distance, it displays large-granularity info like the weather, upcoming appointments, and so on. You can say “mail” and it’ll switch to email, or “calendar Wednesday” and it’ll switch to that. And when you approach, it senses your proximity with the Kinect and switches to a touchscreen mode where you can touch the news and email items and read them.

All put together by one guy, admittedly using APIs developed by hundreds, but a fun demonstration of what’s possible with the project right now.

We then selected a proposed UI element to be coded tonight more or less from scratch. In this case, a sort of drawer menu was desired, something that could display metadata or properties for an item on screen like a photo. It would need some kind of UI cue to let people know it was there, a gesture to activate it and deactivate it, and some basic parameters to make it play well with other elements.

For something as simple as this, there are still tons of design decisions. Right off the bat, there was the “just in time” question. Should the drawer’s “handle” be visible at all times? Should it show up when you tap, drag, or hold the object? How long after should it disappear? I asked if we could use the Surface 2.0′s ability to see things before they touched the screen and “magically” make the handle appear, but there wasn’t enough time to create the brightness-based blob creation I had in mind.

And then there was the question of how far we wanted to dictate how the item was used. We shouldn’t make it right-side-only in case developers wanted to make it ambidextrous, for instance, and it was decided that handle visibility could be made flexible and left up to the software designers. It’s in situations like this that you can see some fundamental differences between how Microsoft and Apple work. A small sample size, admittedly, but it falls in line with the philosophies I observed at work last week in the Explorer ribbon debacle.

First we discussed, then we whiteboarded, then we started coding. And by “we” I mean “they,” because I don’t know anything about it. I did make some suggestions regarding how to monitor certain types of touches, and I thought I had a rather clever idea regarding how to combine the gestures for opening and closing the drawer (we didn’t implement it, despite its brilliance). And piece by piece, with a few hilarious setbacks (including a not-so-hilarious pizza-related one), our UI element took form.

By the end of the night, we could boast that we’d created a box that you could slide out from underneath another box. But its simple operation belied the many details that went into its construction: it was aligned with and moved along with the other UI element, it only pulled out to a certain distance, and it could potentially be filled with content very easily. We’d left ways for it to be configured one way or another, and despite a few bugs it was a working element — from concept to execution in two hours.

And this is why Surface Garage exists. Because it’s fun to create things like this, to see the results of some collaboration and work after a short interval, and know that it was created that way because everyone wanted it that way. After this, someone will pick up the code for the drawer, clean it up, give it a few parameters, and who knows, maybe the next time you see a Surface, our drawer will be lying dormant under the virtual photos scattered in virtual piles on the screen. Maybe you’ll even see something like it in Windows 8.

I’ve often written about how Microsoft tends to smother good ideas in the cradle, or else strangle them with internal conflict. It’s good that groups like this one (surely one of many) exist, as a blowoff valve for developers just interested in creating. They may not be building billion-dollar ideas, but beer, pizza, and time with like-minded colleagues is its own reward.

It’s a bit of a random time for a video like this, seeing as the announcement was back at CES and we had a nice, thorough hands-on with the new SUR40 Surface then, but hey. Maybe you missed it. If you don’t mind a little redundancy (and of course, the ever-present soft techno), this is a nice way to catch up on Microsoft’s Surface project.

I won’t lie, I was hoping for a little more substantial information about the PixelSense sensor array, maybe what they’re doing with it (like maybe Windows 8, hello), some cool stuff it does, etc. Oh well. Here’s our hands-on, by the way:

http://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=B3anl4MTplLLa2OhlMWGZFZKBZ17fz0Y&version=2

Yesterday, Pioneer unveiled the WWS-DT101 Discussion Table [JP], which is essentially the company’s answer to Microsoft’s Surface – just bigger and better. The main component here is the 52-inch multi-touch “interactive” LCD display with full HD resolution that supports up to 10 points of contact simultaneously.

In addition, Pioneer squeezed in these features:

• Intel Core i7 950 CPU
• 6GB of memory
• Wi-Fi module
• 2 sub-display ports
• 2 USB ports
• PFU Scan Snap support
• TransferJet support
• DVI, HDMI ports
• 7.5 W（8Ω×2) speakers
• SCHEDA (collaboration desktop software pre-installed)
• VisualSync (software for connecting to iOS devices)
• OS: Windows 7

Pioneer says users can browse the web, view PDF, open MS Office documents, watch videos (WMV only) or view pictures on the display.

The Discussion Table is sized at 1,600mm (W) × 902mm (H) ×1,000 mm (D) and weighs 160kg. Pioneer plans to start selling the best in Japan in July for about $37,000.

Akihabara News had the chance to go hands-on with the display and shot a video (see below):

Hrvoje Benko, a researcher at Microsoft, is working on methods of recognizing shapes formed by hands and equating those with spatially-consistent gestures. Putting the side of your hand down like a wall forms a straight line that could be used for a boundary, cropping, or “pushing” objects. Forming an O with your hand could automatically call up the magnification loupe, and so on.

It’s a very natural extension of how you interact with a surface, since really, that’s how you interact with most surfaces. Right now “Rock and Rails” only includes support for three gestures: a fist, which holds things down, a straight hand, which sets a line to which UI elements can move perpendicular, and a “curved rail,” which sets a pivot point. I’m sure you can imagine a few more, but at the same time, limiting the “vocabulary” of a UI is part of making it usable. Nobody wants to remember a dozen different gestures.

Speaking of surfaces, the video shows the tech being demonstrated on a Surface, which uses a different detection method than your average smartphone or tablet — it can detect shapes far more easily. And the new Surface units, as we learned at CES, have thousands of pixel-sized cameras that can even detect patterns and text. So don’t expect this kind of special recognition to come to iPads any time soon, although it would be similarly unwise to underestimate developers who might want to make it happen.

The whole paper is being published later, so unfortunately this video is pretty much all there is right now, but if you head over to Hrvoje’s page, you can keep track of this and his other projects.

Man, I love me some AR.Drone. It’s literally the coolest thing I’ve used in a long time. And the best part? It just gets cooler. This video shows us what I’m assuming is a non-doctored video of a WinWise employee using a Microsoft Surface to control a Parrot AR.Drone.

If I had my druthers, I’d love for the entire world to fly around on big AR.Drones, getting fatter and fatter like the humans in Wall-E and seeing the world through a screen. Luckily, two thirds of that dream is already coming true, at least for me!

This is why I continue to be excited for the Courier despite having no indication that it’s ever going to actually come out. These things seem to work fine on the Surface as well, but when am I going to ever have one of those in my apartment?

[via WMPowerUser]

Games like this are exactly why Microsoft Surface is going to be a compelling platform. Some students ported Texas Hold ‘em to Surface, but added the ability to look at your cards from a mobile device. Placing a bet is as easy as dragging a chip on to the playing field, and you can even split a chip’s denomination by tapping it. I’d be interested to see what the final version of this product. It’s also good to see Surface gaming used for more then just role playing games.

[via Gizmodo]

We’ve told you about the iTable before, and PQ Labs. They showed off their latest stage in the development process at CeBIT this year, by installing the screen into a coffee table. The newest version can register up to 32 touch points and actually determine the shape of the object being placed on the screen.

But to me, that’s not the real story. The real story is that they installed a game that’s near and dear to my heart, Warcraft III. To me, this is the true future of the touchscreen interface, and the part of the technology that I’m excited about. It’s definitely worth your time to watch the video and see how far they’ve come in the development process, and how they are stacking up against their competitors.

[via Gizmag]

The idea is that the interactive surface would be projected from above, while a stereo-sensitive camera or pair of cameras captures the position of hands, objects, and so on, allowing you to interact with the image. Sounds good to me, though of course top-down projection has its own share of drawbacks. As for the feasibility of the hardware, well, at the moment we are seeing a huge improvement generation-over-generation in pico projectors, but brightness is still an issue. And it’s worth noting that while it would have some similarities with the Surface, it really is a whole different animal, based on different principles of touch and interaction. The little visual tags Surface relies on, for instance, wouldn’t work the same; there’d be more in common (obviously) with the Playstation Eye.

Whatever actually comes of this, it’s good to know it’s being looked into. Between this, Surface, and Natal, Microsoft seems to be taking next-generation interfaces pretty seriously.

[via Gizmodo]

The build we played with was last semester’s (it’s a student project, not a professional development), and since then there’s been a lot of bug-squashing and feature-adding, but the newest build isn’t playable. So they’ve got a short little scenario where we went from a zoomable map screen to a town where we… spotted some orcs! Roll for initiative!

They’ve really taken advantage of the Surface’s ability to recognize the little tags, and your “control” token lets you place your inventory, actions, and so on wherever is convenient. The game keeps track of your guy even if, say, you spill a drink and have to move him and clean up. There’s actually a whole dungeon-master backend on a separate screen that can be manipulated in real time, adding or subtracting monsters, guiding the characters, and so on.

Combat was straightforward, and they noted that a lot of that is being beefed up in the new version. Lots more moves, better dice, and so on. Of course there’s work to be done, but it seems really promising, and remember this is a project put together by a handful of students. They have some stated goals, but with some of the students graduating, the future of the project is uncertain (but not dire). I’m guessing Wizards of the Coast is going to pay through the nose for it — I’m sure they see what it could be with a budget and an extra couple devs working on it.

Now the take-away point here isn’t really “wow, you can play D&D on a touchscreen!” No — that’s very cool, but the point is that this kind of collaborative, intuitive gaming is something I can easily see in bars, lounges, and even schools all over the place. It doesn’t have to be D&D, though the game does lend itself to the medium well. The Surface lends itself to social activities around a table, and you could even connect multiple Surfaces over the net. This game is really just one of the first robust apps to take advantage of this in a cool, nerdy way, and I’m really looking forward to seeing more stuff like this.

Unfortunately, the cost (and bulk) of Surface units kind of limits the places to which they can be deployed. We know they’re going to have a cheaper, flatter version at some point, and it might be hard for something like this to hit critical mass before that happens.

The CMU Surface D&D will be at GDC and PAX East, if you’re dying to check it out.

A couple weeks ago we got an early demo of the Surface SP1 update, and saw that one of the goals of which was to improve Windows-Surface cross-compatibility and encourage developers to make their apps touch-compatible. Looks like that work goes both ways, as it appears that Surface content and functionality is going to be kicking it with Windows 7.

Of course, the Surface’s hardware is mixed blessing: it makes development a lot easier when you’ve designed the hardware (just ask Apple), but makes it a pain when you’re trying to set your cool software up on similar but not identical platforms. Surface can handle a billion touches but the Dell Latitude used in this video demo (no offense, Dell) isn’t quite as capable, though of course it does everything it was designed to do.

It’s certainly not “OMG Surface on yr computar” but I’m looking forward to having lots of overlap between these two delicious Microsoft treats.

[via GottaBeMobile]

There are still a few new visible features, and it’s always fun to play with a Surface, so there’s a nice video for you to watch if you’re interested in how the Surface is changing and how Microsoft is responding to developer feedback. It’s easier to show them than explain them at length, so check them out in the video (hope you like my chin, which was all I could fit into the frame while still including the whole Surface surface).

In more prosaic developments, but no less important ones, Surface is now supported by Microsoft Update — and from my talk with them, it seemed like this is just one of many steps they’re taking to really tie in the Surface to other Windows and Microsoft services and APIs. For instance, they’re working hard to make XNA play well with Surface, and it sounds like the Surface team is going to be instrumental in establishing a set of standardized gestures and motion controls for Surface, Windows 7, and Windows Mobile 7. That’s pretty key, and the Surface team has done a huge amount of research into touch and gesture usability, so they’re the right guys for the job. WPF controls and libraries are also being integrated, so more traditional interfaces can be easily adapted to not be immediately broken by being clicked on in 20 different places at once.

Their little 128-bit identifier tags (we saw those in our behind the scenes look) are being rolled out in earnest, so developers will be able to work those into their apps. I was just thinking how awesome it would be to eat on a Surface and just put down a little picture of the drink you want right there on the table — bam, hit “confirm” or whatever and it’s on the way. They’re also optimizing background processes for better notification ability while in other apps and that sort of thing.

I liked the stress test that helps make sure apps won’t just freak out when there are (for example) chimps pounding on the table all over the place. When they ran it for me in the video above, it managed to exit the app, go shopping, and start ordering Dungeon Siege II before they stopped it. Not bad taste for 20 virtual monkeys. I suppose it would have only stopped when they asked for a card number.

All these improvements and more are being demonstrated in more detail at Tech-Ed, pretty much while you’re reading this article, so if you’re a Surface developer (and not at the sessions — come on), you’ll get a lot more details soon. For the rest of you, though, I thought it might be nice for you to know that the Surface wasn’t just a one night stand for Microsoft; it’s growing up into a real product and they’re actually putting a lot of weight behind it. In the meantime, we’ll keep you posted on all Surface and Surface-related news.

Ladies and germs, behold the wonders of what’s to come. Someday we will live in a world that is filled with Microsoft Surface-like devices and everything will blend seamlessly together. Our notebooks will become manufacturing facilities and scanners. Shopkeeper’ countertops will be large touchscreens and our desks will be virtual desks. The future, according to Microsoft, will be grand and wonderful.

Watch the two videos after the jump about Microsoft’s vision of XUI – experience user interfaces – to experience the future too.

i started something via slashgear

What they didn’t say was exactly what size the touchscreen will be.

[via WSJ]

Who would have thought that one of the coolest things we’ve seen at CES would be hidden in a 10×10 booth at the very back of the South Hall? Like a diamond in the rough, there sat the PQ Labs iTablet.

They’ve essentially taken the idea behind the Microsoft Surface and have done it better in every way. It’s cheaper, it’s gorgeous, and perhaps most notably, it’s not a hulking monster.

Two of the most notable features of the Surface are its multitouch capabilities and the availability of a development SDK, both of which PQ Labs has matched (or, in the case of the SDK, plan to match soon). The number of fingers detected by the multitouch sensor is limited only by the individual software designer’s desire – the hardware itself supports as many simultaneous prods as you can throw at it.

Contrary to its iCliche name, the iTable runs Windows XP rather than on OS X or some proprietary system. The last bit is good news for developers – if you’ve already got an app ready to go, you don’t need to rewrite it from scratch for compatibility. Just call in the proper APIs for mapping input, and you’re good to go. They’re pitching this pretty hard as a “big iPhone” (hence the name) – it’s probably not the best way to market it (as it’s not, you know, a cellphone), but it really does feel similar to the iPhone; the feel of the glass, the way multitouch behaves, it’s all very similar.

The iTable product comes in a variety of flavors, depending how complete of a system you’re looking for. The cheapest way to get in on the fun is the Multi-Touch G², a 32″ LCD overlay that goes for $2,399. Beyond that is where the “Table” part of the “iTable” name comes in – a few grand more (the $5000-$7000 was thrown around in conversation) nets you a table with the sensors incorporated into the display, and roughly $10,000 gets you the aforementioned table with a beast of a computer pre-configured ready to go. It may seem pricey, but with the 30″ surface going for $12,500, it’s relatively cheap.

The company is a recent startup, so they don’t quite have the resources to throw around that Microsoft does. As such, they operating without a warehouse, so these things are being built per order and they’re currently only selling units to businesses. You know, PQ Labs, CrunchGear is a business – hook it up!

Multi-touch and general touchscreen tech is the new tech Wild West, it seems, and like the Lotto, many will enter, only a few will win. Still, competition in this area is essential for innovation; every lackluster touchscreen phone that comes out gets immediately buried because the iPhone had already taken it to the next level. Same with the Surface, but that doesn’t mean either of those products are guaranteed against usurpation.

If you’re interested, head down to Florida on the 18th for the International Association for Amusement Parks and Attractions expo and check the thing out. (giggle)