Think in terms of Minority report ;)

I also think voice recognition sucks.
It’s so not an appropriate medium in so many situations. Do I really want to be dictating what I want to go to text to a train?… Nope.
Likewise in a lecture i’d love to make my own notes and not have to copy verbatim what the lecturer wants to talk about.
Thats not even taking into account the accuracy issues - my subjective experience has never been great. Though admittedly I do know a person who wrote a book entirely with a speech recognition program.

I do think multitouch is overhyped though.
Has some cool possibilities for music though (xy midi controllers, continuum’s and stuff like that) - some company is already messing around with this, but can take infinite numbers of touch inputs etc…
However, I’d love for apple to surprise me and make something of it thats not gimmicky and not niche.

And finally fingerprints suck. When people poke my laptop screen I sometimes feel like I should poke them in the eye.

Voice recognition is an old technology, has been around for years and if it never succeeded there must be a reason in my opinion. It wasn’t only the imperfection of the speech recognition engines, but the simple fact that, most of the times, is far quicker to point and click somewhere than to extensively explain to your computer what you intend to do with it.

I’m sure that speech recognition will gain more importance in the future, for various reasons, but it will never completely replace other forms of Human Computer Interaction, I’m not saying that the multi-touch will be widespread in 20 years, maybe we can’t still imagine what will come out by that time.

And please take my advice, don’t understimate multi-touch technology, it is in its early stages and has still a long way to go to reach beyond-eyecandy efficience and perfection.

greetings,

Michele

I fail to see how this is the same as firewire. Firewire had competition that was widely adopted by Apple’s competitors. And USB caught up. Firewire is still better but USB is ‘good enough’. What is the competitor to “multi-touch”? Oh there isn’t one because multi-touch is not a product or a standard. Its a way of interacting with a tool.

And voice recognition is not the future. Sorry dude - as long as we are all sitting in cubes - voice recognition will not take a prominent role.

Multi-touch has a great future and the iPhone is only the first step in showing its capabilities. And its an awesome first step. I am looking forward to see how vendors will apply it. Most of your reasons are shortsighted and naive.