Touchscreen Netbooks To Shine At CES 2009

i4u writes "The new generation of netbooks debuting at CES 2009 will add touch and have twistable screens to use them in tablet or notebook style. Intel is set to introduce a new Classmate netbook with a twistable screen and touchscreen at the CES 2009. Back in October Asus said it was planning to introduce touchscreen Asus Eee netbooks in early 2009. Asus is exhibiting at the CES Unveiled pre-show that takes place on January 6th. Expect the Asus Eee Touch to be unveiled then. Gigabyte has outrun all of them with the Intel Atom-powered M912V that has been on the market for a while. Adding a touchscreen is rather easy. More difficult is to offer a touch-optimized UI. Let's see what the netbook vendors are going to invest on the software side."

Comments

Re:Touchscreens

[BikeHelmet]

While I see what you mean, I partly disagree.

Touchscreens can be useful for certain tasks, such as... note taking during a lecture, or drawing something in a paint program. They're also handy on smaller handhelds where keyboards aren't feasible.

They're already super popular in cell phones. I don't see why they wouldn't be viable in a netbook, although I fully agree that there's basically no market for them on full size laptops.

Maemo

[ultrabot]

You guys should keep an eye out for what Nokia has in the pipeline for Maemo.

The "Hildon" desktop is optimized for touch usage, is open source and will be shipped with Ubuntu MID.

http://www.clutter-project.org/ will play an interesting role as well.