And touch.

Since the Apple invit­a­tion for today’s media event reached the pub­lic eye, the last writ­ten bit has always struck me as odd. I’m not in favour of read­ing too much into these invit­a­tions, but they have car­ried hints (in pre­vi­ous events) about what sub­ject is going to be approached on stage.
«And touch.» it says. It seems a bit like a waste of copy work to rein­force a very well known fea­ture of a product very well known by every­body (even more with a pic­ture that openly declares which product Apple’s talk­ing about). Unless…

Well, when I read this art­icle on Neowin.net (video) about touch-feedback in the next-gen iPad, there was some­thing that clicked and made sense to me. On one hand, I don’t think it is a required fea­ture for the suc­cess of the iPad 3 (or whatever will be called) and, ration­ally think­ing, maybe it is a far-fetched guess. On the other hand, if some sort of touch-feedback tech­no­logy was con­sidered ready for prime-time, I think Apple would do it in order to dis­tance their products even more from the sparse “competition”.

So, the ques­tion is, since there’s barelly any com­pet­i­tion for now, wouldn’t the so much agreed upon (by the ‘whole’ writ­ten web) 2048 by 1536 pixels ret­ina dis­play be enough to do that?
While the iPad ret­ina dis­play will carry an impress­ive num­ber of pixels com­par­ing to the 2560 by 1440 pixels of the 27″ iMac dis­play (take a moment and soak that in), there have been a few rumors about ret­ina dis­plays in upcom­ing competitor’s tab­lets. I guess at least Samsung isn’t sleep­ing on the job (and what a great job of “fol­low­ing” Apple they have done).

Regarding this I guess it makes sense for Apple to explore other ways to make the touch-based exper­i­ence even bet­ter. Having tried haptic feed­back in an android product with embar­rass­ing res­ults, I fig­ure the touch-feedback tech Apple would go for will/would have to be some­thing else, ‘light-years’ ahead. Nevertheless, as hard as a ret­ina dis­play is of show­ing off on stage, touch-feedback will be some­what impossible and only a room with devices for the Press to test will con­vey any inform­a­tion to con­sumers before such product reaches the stores.

If this comes to pass, the design and inter­ac­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies this new layer of inter­face brings seem very inter­est­ing over­all — from games to bet­ter access­ib­il­ity options. This new inter­ac­tion is what interests me the most.

Just a bit of guess­ing game before the show. It will all be settled in a few hours, anyway.