So, great news: Microsoft, Intel, and hardware vendors have unveiled the Ultra-Mobile PC. What is it? Exactly the same tablet as before, only smaller, much slower, much less flexible, and only slightly cheaper. Uh — yay? Search on Technorati for all the buzz if you want, but I can sum it up:

It’s a smaller, slower tablet that delivers less value with more tradeoffs. And for music, it’s totally disastrous. Meanwhile, there are fantastic tablet computers that do so much more, at about the same price. Ironically, the UMPC comes just as those tablets have finally matured.

Updated: Two potential items could change my (and maybe your) mind on the new mini-tablets. One is, the price could in fact get closer to $500, which makes my comparison to bigger, more powerful tablets totally moot, and makes them much more appealing as a satellite to your main computer(s). Two, it would be interesting to run Windows Remote Desktop or VNC to remotely control a more powerful computer, or do simple sequencing and soft synths via this tablet, the USB port, and your favorite hardware controller. -PK

Let’s compare: there’s no ship date or pricing yet, but Microsoft says it’ll run “under $1000,” which I’m guessing means $999. By contrast, Toshiba will sell you its Satellite R15 tablet/notebook hybrid for US$1149. (Pictured here. Boy, I actually want it.) It has everything you need to replace your laptop: a QWERTY keyboard, a big screen, USB and FireWire, and even a DVD burner. It’s no powerhouse, but it’ll run Reason soft synths or an Ableton Live set (with an external hard drive, ideally), and it’ll certainly run Sibelius or Finale on a music stand. It even has a swift 1.7G Pentium M, which means it can probably outrun my existing Toshiba notebook workhorse. The new Samsung Q1: think 900 MHz Celeron. 900 MHz, seriously? Yes, okay, the Q1 looks slick (though it reminds me of a portable Sega), and the Toshiba looks clunky. But I’ve used tablets in person, and they’re quite portable and comfortable. Aside from a few touch-friendly extras, these UMPCs even run the same tablet OS! (That’s a good thing, but it furhter suggests that they’re really just downgraded tablets.)

So why would you get a hobbled “Ultra-Mobile PC” that performs like a 4-year-old laptop instead? Battery life is reportedly only 3 hours, and while it is much lighter and smaller than a tablet, it’s not light and small enough to match the form factor of the many excellent Windows Mobile PDAs on the market. I love my Dell Axim X30, for instance. Maybe you’d get the UMPC to play music and video — but at nearly a grand, that makes it yet another silly entertainment toy for the rich, and with everyone blowing money on iPods, Xbox 360s, and the like, that seems wildly unlikely to catch on. Yes, I’m being unfair by looking at this product from the music market, which isn’t Microsoft’s target market. But think about it: the whole point of the PC is that there is no one target market. It’s the flexibility of the device for a broad swath of users. And that makes me look at the UMPC and think about product failures like eMate and Newton rather than product successes like the original Apple PowerBook or iPod. (Boy, uh, it is interesting how Apple managed to create the blockbusters in those categories, huh?)

So why am I bothering even griping about this? Because I think tablet computers could be the missing link in the mobile music studio. And, in fact, looking at the UMPC and checking out the latest tablet specs makes me want to go trade my existing laptop for a tablet right now.

There’s also another possibility that’s missed here: why not have a tablet remote for your desktop computer? It’s not a new idea, but I still haven’t seen it done right. Imagine that instead of a crippled laptop, the tablet served as a dumb terminal for a more powerful desktop form factor PC. It could serve as an additional display, with a headphone jack and touch and stylus input. Your desktop PC (on the desk for consumers or in a rack mount for pros) would do all the heavy lifting, but you could access it from anywhere via the tablet.

There’s reason to believe that desktop enclosures will continue to advance, too. Graphics cards in particular are getting faster by the day, and offering new musical applications with programs like Jitter, as well as some seriously sweet 3D / video eye candy.

The problem is, the UMPC isn’t designed to do this, though you could presumably install Microsoft’s superb Remote Desktop or the open source VNC to do the job, even via a Mac/PC setup. And the UMPC is needlessly pricey for a device that could be a dumb terminal.

So, personally, I think it’s time to entirely throw out Microsoft’s and Intel’s and Samsung’s vision of this, and figure it out for ourselves. I bet we can come up with a much more compelling vision of how to relate to our computers. And hopefully Apple’s recent patent filings for touchscreens mean other manufacturers could get in this game.

“We’re now supporting touch control in addition to electro-magnetic,” he told me. “We’ve done a lot of innovations here. As you know, our fingers are quite fat [compared to a stylus], so we’ve come up with new approaches for getting the focus on a selection. Also, we needed to think through how to handle left and right mouse buttons easily, and we’ve got a new approach to do that with your fingers. We think that’s very impressive.” This technology will work on any PC with a touch screen display, not just Tablet PC hardware, he said.

Check out the full interview on Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite. Now, how could you use this?

There’s no question why this is cool for music. Inexpensive touch displays are readily available, and when your hands are focused on another instrument like a keyboard or guitar, navigating with touch is often more direct than using a mouse. I recently spoke to electronic music guru Exile, who was working with touchscreens and custom Reaktor patches. He was busy building visual interfaces well-suited to the technique. Propping a little touchscreen remote on a keyboard has some definite appeal.

That said, don’t expect this to be anything like a sophisticated touchscreen interface like the Lemur. Microsoft’s interface sounds like it’s single-touch only, so it’s closer to a current mouse/trackpad interface. And cheap touchscreens tend to feel cheap. It’s not just that you have fat fingers; the tracking is often a little vague.

The good news is, the networked living room might actually drive demand for such products. (Some observers noted even Apple’s patent looked like it might be for a home media remote.) A wireless touch tablet (something like this) could be equally at home as the front-end for a rack-mounted PC onstage.

Falling prices and built-in Vista support do mean this could be a standard feature on computers very soon, and for simple interface moves while playing, that could be great. Right now it looks more appealing as a cheap, eBay-ed touchscreen route than a mature product, but you can bet we’ll be watching.

Futuristic musical interfaces could take a radically different direction from what we’ve seen so far, and that distant future may be close — really. But let’s clear some things up:

Not everything cool comes from Apple. The blogosphere last week latched onto a project headed by Jeff Han, a consultant to NYU. Mac heads were apparently confused because last week also brought revelations of a new Apple patent. “Something cool involving touchscreens? Only Apple is capable of coolness! It must be from Apple!” I won’t touch the underlying wrongness of that statement, much as I love the Apple products I use. Instead, let’s look at a more practical reason why that’s wrong. Han’s magical touchscreen is gorgeous, but not fitting into an iPod enclosure any time soon, as it uses back projection. (Read: you’re carrying around a projector. Unless you have REALLY big pockets . . .)

Not only that, but if you read the Apple patent carefully, you’ll notice, as I said before, it’s a patent on designing UIs for multi-touch interfaces and specifically gestural inputs. Apple cut a lot of hardware R&D in the 90s, and with it the number of tech patents coming out of their labs. That’s a good thing: let someone else spend the money on research, and focus on great design and bringing that research to market. This looks like it’d fit that pattern: someone else designs a great, cheap multi-touch interface, and Apple designs a great interface. But it could also mean that last week’s buzz aside, someone else could very well beat Apple to a gestural, multi-touch computer interface. We’ll see. In the meantime, if you don’t mind carrying a projector around and doing some hard-core programming, you can go build your own. Moving on . . .

Multi-touch interaction roundup: For a better overview of all these multi-touch developments and how they relate, check out the roundup assembled by interaction design expert (and Friend of CDM) Chris O’Shea at Pixelsumo. I endorse what Chris says, and as for the one shipping product for music, the Lemur, you should be seeing more US publications with reviews soon.

Beware of sweeping statements about musical interfaces. Here’s an example: JazzMutant, the makers of Lemur, start out describing their product by suggesting that nothing else can compete with it: “Are you seriously planning to control a 32 band vocoder with a fader box? Have you ever tried to change a realistic reverb made of nearly thirty parameters in real-time? Which input device allows you to take all the benefit of a powerful physical model synthesizer?”

What’s wrong with this statement? Designing a new interface to solve problems like controlling a complex vocoder can be great, but JazzMutant’s assumption that their particular touchscreen is the only way is simply wrong. A 32-fader control surface could work just fine with a vocoder. Tricky to control? Yes. So is the touchscreen, because you’re still limited by having only two hands. Then again, with practice, any number of interfaces could solve this problem. You might discover the Lemur is the best way to control your 32-band vocoder or reverb or whatever it is. Then again, you might not. Sweeping statements open up interface designers to criticism. But the fact that there are alternatives is a good thing, not something to be feared. Speaking of which . . .

Don’t overlook tablets. Then again, that’s another story.

Now, more experiments in multi-touch interfaces are appearing by the day. Aside from mysterious Apple patents, we have, via We Make Money Not Art, new research in multi-touch interactions from a team led by Jefferson Han. (Demos pictured.) This isn’t just any touchscreen: not only does it recognize multiple fingers as inputs, but it projects whatever imagery you want in response, enabling new, fluid interfaces, and even responds to force feedback.

Internal tracking allows you to use up to ten fingers at once — that could be both your hands, you and a friend, you and four friends using two fingers each, etc. That much we’ve seen before, in the form of the one shipping product in this category, Cycling ’74’s Lemur.

But this research project features key capabilities the Lemur lacks: instead of fixed, pre-defined, static interface objects, Han’s research features back-projected imagery. That blows open the possibilities of this kind of interface, because it allows the team to experiment with fluid, game-like interfaces that provide the illusion of the tangible world. You’ll see demos of modular sound synthesis, lava lamps, and various other ideas. In other words, the touchscreen is finally as flexible as the computer in the graphics department, only now no longer limited to a single point of interaction (the mouse cursor). Han again applies his Frustrated Total Internal Reflection technique to tracking, the magic behind the multiple touch points. But there’s another twist: force sensing, granting this interface the potential for more realistic expression.

I’m not convinced these interfaces will ever replace the tactile sensation mechanical devices provide, as found on knobs, faders, and musical keyboards. But as computer interfaces, they could fundamentally change the way we relate to software.

Now the question is, who will get to market first with an affordable, mass-market device? The beauty of this research project is that the back projection can be whatever you want. Musicians could benefit from the mass market purchasing such hardware for other applications. Then it’ll be up to us to figure out smart musical applications — sure, the technology is cool in itself, but think how many possibilities there could be for each of those demos?

What does a digital lava lamp sound like?

Multi-touch Interaction Research [Description, QuickTime movie]

Gestures, not hardware: Hardware isn’t mentioned anywhere in the patent. The patent seems to suggest, for the purposes of the filing, at least, that Apple is developing a software method for processing multi-touch inputs from hardware, not proprietary hardware itself. Specifically named in the filing are data analysis and classification, gesture recognition, floating controls and interactive UIs that respond to touch, and several specific gestures: zoom, pan, rotate, scroll, and page turns. (Yes, that’s right: this could be an e-book reader and not a real tablet Mac. But let’s hope not.)

For a sense of just how many possible hardware solutions are out there, just read the patent: “The touch sensing device may be based on sensing technologies including but not limited to capacitive sensing, resistive sensing, surface acoustic wave sensing, pressure sensing, optical sensing, and/or the like. Furthermore, the touch sensing means may be based on single point sensing or multipoint sensing.”

The audio mixer: hrmpf.com gets points for the best anaysis of this. Aside from their ability to get the images on the US Patent Office website to work properly, they’ve noticed specific specifications for a mixing device. And yep, we’re talking mixer as in audio mixer. This may just be for purposes of demonstration — or, perhaps, Apple is planning a home entertainment interface. Mixers often make the least compelling application of touchscreens, because (as you can see from the image), they duplicate hardware exactly but lose the critical feature of mixers: tactile feedback. That said, it’s in there.

What this means for music UIs: The patent itself points out the limitations of conventional UIs: they’re built around the assumptions of mice and joysticks, of a single X,Y cursor point in space. I don’t think anyone would argue that exclusive model will work forever. Interestingly enough, most music software, as an on-screen replica of devices like mixers, isn’t built around this model. It already inherits the assumptions of real-world devices that recognize you can use more than one finger (cursor) at a time. Otherwise, all mixers would have only one fader.

Is this coming, and when? Well, “when” certainly anyone’s guess (confident Web speculation aside)! There are plenty of hurdles here to making this a mainstream computer device: making the hardware affordable, building new UIs from the ground up, fine-tuning gesture recognition, and then re-programming the UIs for applications to take advantage of the interface. Tablet computers are easy. Multi-touch gesture recognizing computers are harder. It took 20 years or so to get the mouse right; it could be worth the time to get this right, too. But “if”? Again, the underlying technology is there, and the basic interface concept is intuitive. I think you’ll see all sorts of applications of the idea, possibly starting with simpler products first, and it’d be hard to argue that this will never happen.

What about the Lemur? Music thing observes that if this ships, it moves in on the niche-marketed Lemur multi-touch device for music. Of course, patent filing or no, many of us have wondered if general-purpose multi-touch devices could eclipse the specialized Lemur eventually. (The “eventually” being extremely unclear, given the cost of bringing such products to market.) The Lemur has the advantage of a head-start, of course, so this argument is meaningless until someone else actually ships. But it’s also worth noting the things the Lemur isn’t: it doesn’t do gesture recognition. It doesn’t have a truly interactive interface: your fingers can’t create new interface elements, for instance. Instead, they act as a set of ten cursors in place of one: while the objects underneath your fingers move around and respond to physics, you’re still fundamentally just pointing at them. A real gesture-based interface as hinted at in the patent is potentially much more sophisticated. It would also be incredibly challenging to develop; let’s face it, even Apple is talking about more pedestrian features like “page turns.” So who knows how sophisticated the Apple R&D labs are getting. (I’d watch out for research from other large companies, too — someone with money to invest in this project and large potential markets, like a Samsung or even medical instrument suppliers.)

Bottom line? The potential of the technology, as usual, is more interesting than the Mac rumor mill. It’s great to hear Apple is playing around with gestures. But they’re not the only ones. I’ve even seen experimental music systems for gesture processing. Ultimately, we’re likely to see new hardware to play with, in low-cost, mass-produced form. So the challenge becomes the one Apple is trying to conquer: build brilliant software, brilliant interfaces, and make them work for music. That’s a challenge no one is likely to definitively solve. Trying — that’s the fun part.