A day before its official UK unveiling, TechReview gained exclusive access to Medion’s first touch screen desktop. Labelled ‘The Touch’ (any guesses as to why it couldn’t be called Touch?), this is the first home computer we’ve seen to employ a Microsoft Surface-style multi-touch interface.
The look and feel of The Touch is the work of renowned industrial design company Pilotfish (www.pilotfish.eu) who has worked with Medion to create an interesting spin on the home desktop.
Designed to be mounted on a wall or used with a supplied stand, the 24-inch full HD screen sits above a media bar that includes; shortcuts to playback control, a fingerprint reader that links to individual family profiles, a trackpad style control area and integrated Dolby Home Theatre-certified speakers and subwoofer. Although you’ll need to add three more speakers for true surround sound, the audio quality emitted from the 7.7cm deep chassis is impressive and good enough to fill a small room.
More impressive, however, is the multi-touch. The screen is quick, responsive and breathes a whole new life into Microsoft’s Virtual Earth (or is that Bing Maps?). Grab the map with all fingers, spin it, twist it, zoom in and out. It’s the kind of multi-touch feature that Windows 7 was made for and The Touch implements it superbly. Even prodding the new Windows interface was receptive, although you will need to use the supplied wireless keyboard and mouse for certain tasks. Tweeting rants, for example.
Another couple of neat bespoke tricks are its ability to be controlled by speech and a Palm WebOS-style conglomeration of webmail accounts in one place, which will undoubtedly benefit those with multiple eBay accounts. Ahem.
Rick Munday, Medion UK Marketing Manager, told TechReview that ‘The Touch’s speech control technology was taken directly from Medion’s range of sat nav devices. Using years of speech recognition R&D, Medion has been able to create a genuinely usable voice-control platform that allows you to open applications, adjust volume, zoom into documents and open emails’
And, after playing with it ourselves, we can vouch that it does what it says on the tin, although the best results were achieved by standing around a metre from the built-in mic.
It doubles up with the latest version of Media Centre and the built-in DVB-T and DVB-S tuners to act like a PVR. Picture quality is good and the new Media Centre interface gets a thumbs-up from us.
Inside its svelte frame are options for an Intel Core 2 Quad Processor, 4Gb of DDR2 SDRAM, 1TB hard drive, nVidia GeForce GT240M graphics, Bluetooth 2.1, a 2mp webcam and a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, which is still accessible when mounted on a wall.
The Touch is loaded with ports including a quadruplet of USB ports, eSATA, gigabit Ethernet and HDMI out.
First impressions of The Touch are good. Although the full features of Microsoft Surface (object recognition etc) are yet to materialise on anything for the home, this vertical multi-touch computer offers a glimpse to how people will interact with home computers from this point forward.
Shipping with Windows 7 Home Premium and coming in two versions costing in the region of RM 7800 and RM 8000, The Touch will be yours to own in November.
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