Microsoft Surface

Expect a number of technology announcements today because of The D Conference | All Things Digital.

First up, Microsoft Surface. They took a 30" LCD touchscreen display, put it horizontal and added some cool software. The website is slick. Apparently it will be available for partners (restaurants, hotels) in November and not for consumers for 3 years. Popular Mechanics has a Behind-the-scenes First Look video of it.

The real neat thing is that you can put a wifi digital camera down and it's detected (drawing a circle around it) and automatically downloads the pictures in it and displays them. Then you can do the Minority Report/iPhone thing, moving them around, resizing, editing, etc. The site shows video of the WiFi capabilities of the Zune coming in real handy here and to send them to a wifi phone on the surface, just drag it to the phone. The Today show showed this in the restaurant theme, doing the same thing with credit cards. You put the card(s) down, it saw them and then you could drag the items from the bill to the various cards to split the check. I'm not sure how it read the credit card though. The MS site has this in "The Possibilities" video so I suspect it's not there yet.

Another thing that confuses me is that I thought Apple had the patents for these various touch technologies. That's what Jobs said during the iPhone announcement. I thought a lot of this stuff came from NYU researcher Jeff Han. He released a video in jan of 2006 that everyone linked to; I blogged it in feb 2006. I guess this is why the Microsoft Site has an "Origins" section showing the evolution of this project from 2001 till now.