Just say no? For drugs and tablets
In the 1980s Nancy Reegan fronted a public service advertising campaign ‘Just say no‘, originally designed to combat rampant cocaine and marijuana usage in the US.
About this time Hewlett Packard released one of the first touchscreen computers. The HP-150 was MS-DOS compatible. It was unsuccessful because users didn’t like to take their fingers off the keyboard to use a touchscreen and accomplish the same things but more slowly.
Over two decades later and there are even more people who can touch type, yet technology companies don’t seem to have learned their lessons on touchscreens. Windows laptops with touchscreen technology tend to be heavier, more cumbersome and complex with fancy hinges to facilitate use of the tablet. Yet since the success of the iPhone touch is seen as the answer to everything.
Don’t get me wrong, it has its uses in hospitals, kiosks or items which need an e-signature like the Fedex and UPS delivery services but it doesn’t facilitate productivity in a lot of applications. It takes cool engineering and technology to make a touchscreen interface, but that doesn’t mean that its right for the majority of users: ReadWriteWeb describes it more impolitely as ‘Tablets are Toys‘.