Windows 7 - Vista's Successor

Windows Vista just came out not too long ago, but already we see its successor, Windows 7, on the horizon. At The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference a couple weeks ago, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer talked about this new operating system to be released in late 2009.

From what I’ve seen, the interface looks extremely similar to the Microsoft Surface with touch screen capabilities (based on Microsoft’s multi-touch software). It will have a “Touchable Paint” program that allows you to paint with your fingers, a multi-touch photo gallery with two-finger zoom, multi-touch piano application, a mapping application that pulls data from Microsoft’s Live Maps/Microsoft Virtual Earth and a similar dock look to what we see in Apple’s OS X.

“We are at an interesting juncture where almost all of the interaction is with the computer and mouse today and over the years to come,” Gates said. “The role of speech, vision, ink - all of those will become huge.”

He’s referring to gadgets that give you the ability to control it with voice commands or electronic ink (touch) - we’ll be up-to-date with Star Trek soon! Taking into consideration what we’ve seen with Apple’s iPhone revolution, Windows 7 could be the next big step in the PC development realm.

In addition, soon we’ll probably see companies come out with multi-touch screens ready for Windows 7. In fact, Albatron is ready with its 22-inch LCD (1680x1050). It has a sensor on each side of the display, and scalable to 24 inches (and more with an extra sensor). Rumors say this screen will only cost 20 percent more than an average LCD monitor. That’s not bad for what it can do.

Right now there aren’t many details out there for what else it has in store, but stay tuned ...