RIM Envisions Touchscreen PCs and Smart Tables (video)



Wouldn't it be amazing if you could tap your computer monitor like a tablet, or type directly onto a surface without the need for a keyboard? Well, in two videos most likely meant to be private, Research In Motion revealed what our future might look like.  



In the video above, employers use a touchscreen PC for managing job applicants and employees swipe their phones to get easy, secure access to buildings and get personal directions to their new seat at the office. Even more, the new hire deploys a virtual keyboard from her device to type directly onto her desk.

LAUNCH has contacted RIM and the user who uploaded the videos and will update this story if we receive a response.

In the second video, a homeowner controls his home security system from his mobile device, receives real-time power outage updates and uses a touchscreen computer to schedule an engineer. After the engineer leaves, he uses his mobile device to confirm that the job is complete, unlock his car and receive directions to his next location via augmented reality.



RIM could use some good news and killer new products. Its three-day BlackBerry outage last month affected customers worldwide and spurred a class-action suit. BlackBerry continues to lose market share to iOS and Android phones, down five percentage points between May and October according to comScore.

RIM is already making some of that video a reality. The company worked with Porsche Design on the Porsche P'9981 smartphone, which features an augmented reality app experience, concierge service and support for Near Field Communications, selling for $2K. While the Porsche P'9981 is not featured in those videos, it is definitely a sign that BlackBerry is moving in the direction of what it demonstrated in its vision of the future.

"While these films may or may not have been intended for public consumption, they were briefly posted to an online portfolio site before being marked as private; we were able to dig them out of our cache," psurviver, the user who uploaded the video, wrote.
 
As he notes, "the one thing both videos have in common is a full-screen smartphone with edge-to-edge display which interacts seamlessly with other pieces of technology like touchscreen PCs and Surface-like smart tables," he writes. "This obviously-rendered handset is clearly not a planned device, but its capabilities are interesting, even if they do mainly extrapolate upon technologies just finding a foothold today."

The video is rather similar to Microsoft's recent vision of the future that features touch displays embedded into everyday objects.  The video offers "a glimpse of the future of productivity" and shows cloud connections as the primary way to transfer content.  

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