Windows Touch in Windows 7 includes single touch and multi-touch built in. Now before you start poking your monitor and wonder why it’s not working… you need to have a touch sensitive screen. The good news is there is tons of choice out there. Ben has talked about a few great choices the Toshiba Libretto, Sony Vaio L, Toshiba Satellite M500, HP Pavilion dv6, Sony Vaio J All-in-One, and the HP Touchsmart series.
Now if you don’t have a new PC with a touch screen you can purchase a touch sensitive add-on monitor to enjoy touch on your current pc running Windows 7. On the Windows Compatibility Center, we have a list of some of the current great touch add-on monitors now available.
I took my office desktop and hooked it up to the Dell SX2210T 21.5” Multi-Touch Monitor with Webcam. The screen is on sale for $319 on Dell.com. The monitor includes an integrated 2.0 megapixel webcam making it simple and easy for you to capture photos and videos of yourself playing on the monitor. It’s also full HD (1920 x1080) with a 16:9 widescreen display.
The screen was very responsive and I had some fun finger painting with Paint and exploring planets with Microsoft WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft research.
Interacting with Windows through Windows Touch was very intuitive. The Start menu and taskbar with their larger fingertip-friendly icons were easy to navigate. As you saw with my Paint experiment, many of the familiar Windows 7 programs are also touch-ready.
So if have been hankering to use Windows Touch and aren’t quite ready for a whole new PC, I recommend checking out some of the touch add-on monitors available. Of course, they all have earned the Compatible with Windows 7 Logo. If you have any comments, feel free to ping me on twitter @windowsgal.
