Over half of PCs bought for under 15 users to have touch screens by 2015 - Gartner

The adoption of touch-enabled devices in the enterprise would be slow, Gartner says, due to heavy requirements for typing and text input. The "muscle memory" of mouse users and the potential problems of moving a user's hands from the keyboard to the mouse will create particular adoption barriers for knowledge workers. Instead, consumers and education will be the earliest adopters of touch-enabled PCs and notebooks. The research firm says that a key target usage for the next wave of tablets will be media content consumption including movies, newspapers and e-books, and the real success driver for entertainment devices will be the content delivery ecosystem. If this category succeeds, it will create greater market awareness of and demand for touch in other PC applications.


Enterprises would also be slow adopters of the touch input for mainstream knowledge workers as the long tail of legacy enterprise applications that don't leverage touch and the large contingent of “mouse-trained employees” will make many enterprises doubt the business case for adding touch — and any additional costs — to PC hardware standards. Gartner says that enterprises eventually would be forced to acknowledge the use of touch for mainstream knowledge users as employees are increasingly bringing their own PCs and technologies to work, whether sanctioned or not.

Furthermore, Gartner thinks that as prices drop, education will become a major market for touch and pen-enabled devices. Younger children just entering school find direct manipulation on the screen a natural way to interact with their computers, at a time when older students are already using pen input to annotate class material or capture formulas and graphics that can't be recorded with keyboards. Gartner says that while most school districts would be reluctant to support two separate devices — one for touch and another for pen – most  would look for dual-input screens that support both touch and pen in a single device. Fiering says this should be considered as the precursor to a major upcoming “generational shift” in how users relate to their computing devices.

Gartner says progress would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and no single "killer application" would change the market overnight. It expects an incremental introduction of user interface and ergonomics improvements, drops in hardware prices and increases in touch-enhanced software to drive the segment. "As with many recent technology advances, touch adoption will be led by consumers and only gradually get accepted by the enterprise," Fiering said in a statement. "What will be different here is the expected widespread adoption of touch by education, so that an entire generation will graduate within the next 10 to 15 years for whom touch input is totally natural.