Ready to chuck your mouse?

17Jul08

Well the BBC reports that Gartner is calling time of death on the mouse in the next 3-5 years.  I hope so.  I’m definitely ready to ditch my mouse and wish I could recycle my keyboard along with it, however I don’t think it will happen in that timeframe.

Thankfully, iPhone sales are helping drive touch based device sales. HP is advertising their Touchsmart devices and Dell is starting to make some noise about theirs, however PC turnover just doesn’t happen that quickly.  Also at the end of the day the design paradigm for applications on these devices need to switch to take advantage of touch capabilities, kinda like what happens with processing power, it takes a while for those new processors to get out there in the marketplace, then to reach a meaningful saturation point, which then drives software creators to take advantage of the new power, but unfortunately unlike my example this is not just an upgrade in power but a whole new way of interacting with the computer.  It will require new user behaviors and understanding as well as new applications that harness the power of touch.  The good news is touch should be a lot more intuitive then the unnatural keyboard and mouse that we all had to learn.  

Time to chuck em?!

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Tags: gartner, iphone, mouse