Hewlett-Packard (HP) is planning to stir up the touch panel notebook market with multi-touch technology at the end of this year, and with Windows 7, which according to Microsoft will include features to take advantage of multi-touch capabilities, on the horizon, notebook industry players are paying close attention to the development of multi-touch technologies.
Touch panel tablet PCs are mostly niche market products currently and usually single-touch only due to costs and limited software support. However, notebook industry players believe multi-touch has the potential to take off in the mainstream market thanks to handset devices such as the iPhone. Windows 7 will also be key for promoting multi-touch since it enables multi-touch interfaces as part of the Windows operating system, the sources noted.