Julianne Pepitone for CNN Money:
The original Microsoft Surface, unveiled in 2007, was a 30-inch touchscreen tabletop. That device popped up in hotels and bars, and it let users interact with both digital items and physical objects through the use of infrared cameras.
With the Monday debut of the Surface tablet, though, the original tabletop product has been renamed “PixelSense.” That was already Microsoft’s name for the underlying technology that helps power the tabletop product.
I’m not sure why Microsoft thought it was better to recycle the “Surface” brand as the name for the new tablet instead of creating a new brand out of whole cloth. But that’s Microsoft for you.
Better question is why did they waste their time making a touch table? They certainly cornered the $10,000 point of sale/table market. Yup.
I thought the same thing. When I first read the blog post title on The Verge, I expected to see them showcase a drinking glass on the tablet and it responding accordingly.
Weird to recycle. I agree.
The Surface Table, inspiration for a ton of sci-fi movie interfaces not to mention appearing in a James Bond flick.
what I want to know is if I can Hackintosh it to run iOS. That would be some awesome Angry Birds games.
There are only so many product names their marketing people could come up with, after all.
An even better question is why anyone thought that an upside down projector in a table that hid a Windows PC and some infrared sensors constituted anything more than a gimmicky kludge of a concept product demo.
I don’t even think it’s fair to call the original Surface a product, per se. It was Microsoft’s attempt to pretend it was on the hip and trendy cutting edge of touch based computing, when it obviously had no such chops.
I think Surface is a pretty good name and Microsoft decided not to squander it on a gimmicky prototype.