The imminent BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 adds the missing messaging apps to RIM’s tablet, but it also marks a big shift in how BlackBerry devices handle email.

RIM is moving on from the proprietary email system that’s been the foundation of its success in business and is joining Google and Apple in adopting a mobile email protocol from Microsoft. But that doesn’t mean BlackBerry is abandoning its trademark security or long battery life.

With the PlayBook 2.0 – and future BlackBerry 10 handsets – you won’t have to run a wizard on the device and connect to the BlackBerry service to set up your email any more.

Instead, you just fill in the email address and password for your email account, like any other device. If it’s a common email service – or any server you’ve used with a BlackBerry device before – that’s all you need to do.

If you’re connecting to a work email account, you can click Advanced and fill in the details of the server, but it’s still far simpler.

EAS support

But the PlayBook doesn’t connect directly to the mail service. BlackBerry software head Vivek Bhardwaj told TechRadar that PlayBook and BlackBerry 10 still take advantage of the BlackBerry infrastructure and servers but things are a lot easier.

“I can put in my Gmail account and what we do in the background is take the username and read the domain [from the email address] and we do all the heavy lifting to get the settings and do all the configuration and send that back down to the device.”

The PlayBook works with standard mail protocols such as IMAP and POP3, but it also supports the popular EAS protocol.

This was developed by Microsoft (originally for Exchange; it stands for Exchange Active Services) but it’s been widely licensed, and is used by Gmail and Yahoo as well as Hotmail. It’s already supported by the majority of smartphones – Android, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Nokia, Palm and even iPhones.

In fact, RIM has been the only holdout, and currently you have to install third-party email tools such as AstraSync to use EAS on a BlackBerry handset or tablet.

Switching to EAS instead of RIM’s proprietary push email transport is a major change, and it’s something of a coup for Microsoft, especially when Bhardwaj praises it as an open standard.

“This is a shift in architecture, based on what we want to deliver as a company. The BlackBerry Internet Service and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server have served us well for the last decade.

“Over time, more consumers have latched on to smartphones, and enough of the industry is at that tipping point so we do need to be about standards. It’s about open standards and an open ecosystem.”

Get email faster

EAS has some major advantages. It’s a proper push protocol that copes with multiple email folders. Mail will arrive on a device using EAS when it arrives on the server. That’s a big improvement over the 15 minutes you wait to check for new emails you get with BIS today (the way any BlackBerry that’s not managed by a business gets email).

Emails you read and delete on your phone will be marked as read or deleted if you look at your mail on the web. This happens with BlackBerry devices today, if you have it set up correctly.

But messages you read in webmail or with another client will be marked as read on your BlackBerry as well, which doesn’t always happen using the current system.

And while there will probably be a setting to choose whether to download the whole of really long messages, you won’t only get the first 2K of each message. That should mean no more scrolling down to the More prompt and waiting for the rest of the message to arrive.

You’ll finally also get your contacts and calendar details synced from your email or calendar service directly to the PlayBook or BlackBerry 10 smartphone, even if you’re not connected to an enterprise BlackBerry system.

Secure and energy efficient

But what about the real advantages of BIS and BES: the security and power efficiency?

Mail will be just as secure, promises Bhardwaj. “The device talks EAS but we wrap security around it. The messages go through a secure tunnel that’s created by BIS or BES, but the transport inside it is EAS.”

Businesses still get to manage BlackBerry devices and control settings on them as well.

And it’s the connection between the server and the phone that keeps power use low (and compresses the data sent back and forth), which still uses the BlackBerry system. If battery life changes for BlackBerry 10, we wouldn’t point the finger at the mail connection.

Loosening the connection between BlackBerry devices and the BlackBerry servers might have other advantages too. It’s no longer one person, one BlackBerry, talking only to a BlackBerry server. PlayBook is going to get BBM (just not in this update).

Could this open up the possibility of BBM coming to other devices that aren’t BlackBerry? We don’t know, but it’s a tempting idea.

Fujitsu is planning to take the European and US mobile market by storm this year with a slew of new Android and Windows Phone tablets and smartphones.

After years of playing in the Japanese phone market, Fujitsu is branching out and hoping to get in on the lucrative European and American smartphone action – just as Panasonic does the same thing.

But while we’re not expecting anything more than a smartphone from Panasonic, Fujitsu has a range of handsets plus tablets to offer, taking in both Android and Windows Phone.

Hardware details

Not much is known about the actual hardware at this point, although reports suggest all models will come equipped with NFC, LTE connectivity and biometric security (like fingerprint unlock).

At this year’s CES, Fujitsu showed off a Tegra 3 quad-core superphone prototype – here’s hoping that speaks of things to come.

Fujitsu has already been in talks with European operators about offering the devices, and claims what it has up its sleeve is “a global product”.

Robert Pryke, director for Fujitsu’s mobile phone business in Europe, said, “The Japanese market has been in a silo from a technology and design perspective, but Fujitsu is bringing out a global product.”

There’s a good chance we’ll see the new Fujitsu tablets and smartphones get a MWC 2012 unveiling: in which case, we’ll be there to bring you our hands on reviews just as soon as humanly possible.

Future computing: The shiny Utopia

Almost nine years ago, I wrote about the next decade of the PC.

I predicted dual-core processors, no more CRT monitors or cables, solid-state drives, plug-and-play networking and the end of the PCI bus. I was right about all those.

We still have cables and spinning hard disks in a lot of computers of course, but it’s a fighting retreat, nothing more.

I predicted a integrated PC with RAM, storage, networking, sound, video and processor, all built onto a single motherboard. The Raspberry Pi is a $25 system that will run Linux on a credit-card-sized circuit board, and you can buy it right now, so I was right about that too.

But I also predicted four things that didn’t happen: a modular PC built from blocks like Lego, handwriting recognition replacing typing, a Google image search that doesn’t rely on keywords, and computers that we use with the screen flat on the desk, like a piece of paper.

I predicted these things because I wanted them to happen and I hoped that predicting them loudly would help to bring them about.

I also didn’t predict lots of things that have happened: the rise of iOS and the app, the way social networking takes up so much of our time, and World of Warcraft. I didn’t see those, because imagining a whole new thing is much harder than extrapolating a trend.

I could argue that some of the things I predicted just haven’t happened yet, but this would be disingenuous. My strike rate is 50 per cent, at best.

So why should my next set of predictions be any more accurate? They probably won’t be. Making specific, testable predictions is always a risky business.

But I can improve my odds slightly with an each-way bet, so let’s consider two alternative futures: one bright, one bleak.

Human ingenuity guarantees that the this tale of two cities will be exciting in both of them, but the path that progress takes in each could be startlingly different…

The shiny Utopia

You want to know what your PC will look like in ten years’ time? I’ll tell you: in ten years’ time you won’t have a PC.

Even now, if you have a desktop PC, it’s only for one of two reasons: either you’re too poor or you’re too rich. Everyone else in the middle-income bracket has a gaming laptop now.

If you’re too poor to afford one of those, your desktop is a compromise machine. It’s a way of getting acceptable frame rates in an affordable, ugly box.

At the top of the pay scale, your laptop is an expensive slice of titanium to make PowerPoint slides on, and at home you have a money-no-object, seething beast with watercooling and lots of unnecessary LED lights, on which you play games at the same frame rates as everyone else.

These ecological niches are shrinking. The desktop PC is just a games console. Everything else it can do, you already have on your phone or your TV. It’s an expensive console that requires expert knowledge to use and maintain.

The laptop is just a heavy netbook or tablet with rubbish battery life. In ten years’ time, you will have an actual console and an actual netbook and nothing else. Neither of these devices will run Windows. You won’t miss it one bit. For one thing, you’ll be too busy playing games.

Within the next ten years we will finally cross the Uncanny Valley. Pre-rendered sequences used in animated movies reached the point of being arbitrarily close to real people with The Adventures of Tintin, but the next step is to do this on the fly, in a game engine.

You might think that Heavy Rain or Battlefield 3 were realistic, but you still mean realistic for a game. Breaching the Uncanny Valley means that characters in games will be literally indistinguishable from a video sequence of a live actor.

When that day arrives, the strangest thing will be how little difference it makes. Those Brobdingnagian levels of graphical processing will have finally managed to make the graphics invisible. You don’t look at real people and marvel at their skin texture, you just take their appearance for granted.

How the PC…

The reason we still play games on a PC now is itself due to a historical oddity. PCs have a keyboard and mouse, and that makes certain kinds of games much easier to play. Those games only evolved because we were all using PCs. That keyboard will stay, but the mouse is on the way out.

On netbooks, it will be replaced with touchscreens. A netbook will essentially become just a tablet with a keyboard built into a clamshell case.

Consoles will also use touchscreens. Not the TV screen though; that would be highly inconvenient. Instead you’ll use the touchscreen on your tablet, netbook or phone. It will sit on your lap to give you keyboard and trackpad functions in one, as well as an extra screen for easy-to-read status information, maps and inventory management.

The Wii U is already doing this with a dedicated touchscreen controller, but there is no reason for console and controller to be sold together. Bluetooth communication is perfectly capable of sharing your key presses and finger gestures from any device, and a simple app will handle the status display.

If it sounds too expensive to buy an iPad just to play on your console, just remember that this is instead of owning a whole other PC. You’ll actually save money. Inside the box, your console will actually be a powerful PC, much as your Xbox 360 is now. You just won’t ever find yourself lifting the lid to look.

Hard disks will be long gone. A combination of cloud storage and flash RAM will give you a box that starts up in five seconds and doesn’t complain if you yank the power cord out accidentally. You won’t find this especially impressive because you have already long been used to this behaviour from your other set-top boxes.

But behind the scenes, drivers will be automatically updating, files and save points will be backing up to multiple locations and security patches will be installing.

Various criminals, terrorists and delinquents will still find ways of hacking and infecting your console of course (I’m not rash enough to predict the end of cybercrime) but it will be much less of a problem. Remember how spam emails used to be a ubiquitous scourge? Then Hotmail and Gmail improved their filtering to some invisible threshold and the problem just sort of melted away.

The same thing is going to happen with viruses and trojans. The end of the PC means we will all do a lot less fiddling than we used to. With the operating system embedded and self-updating, there just isn’t the same scope for idle hands to download dubious files. Take the idiot out of the driving seat and you don’t hit nearly as many lampposts.

…Will disappear

Does this sound like an Orwellian police state? It’s not. It’s the consumerisation of technology. You are the last generation that will be expected – or able – to fix your PC. New inventions always begin as hobbyist toys, and then the case gets sealed shut with tamper-evident screws.

The utopian vision of the PC is that it disappears entirely from our conscious perception. The device is just part of your house, like central heating. The games are just another kind of TV programme, with an audience participation mechanism that’s a little more complicated than texting in your vote.

Future computing: The zombie apocalypse

But what if the economy never picks up? What if everything goes to hell in a handcart and capitalism collapses?

Does that mean that in ten years’ time we’ll all be using ten-year-old computers and playing the same games as we are now? No, it does not. There will still be innovation, it will just move in a different direction.

The first casualty will be Microsoft. In ten years’ time, that company will be entirely irrelevant to you. Microsoft’s current business depends on you buying new PCs with Windows installed. It makes each new version of Windows bigger and more demanding than the last, so your current PC won’t run it. That gives you a reason to upgrade, and when you buy a PC, you buy Windows.

In a bull market nobody minds, because buying new things is always fun. But when everyone is skint and the last four versions of Windows have just added 3D rotating toolbars and a new set of desktop wallpapers, you’ll know the game is up.

Microsoft will retreat initially to the embedded operating systems of consoles and handhelds, but the long and vainglorious heritage of Windows counts for naught here. We don’t care about backward compatibility because each device is self-contained. The huge existing codebase of Windows makes it slow to react to new technologies, and also just plain slow, so it gets outcompeted by more agile, specialised operating systems.

By 2022, the total installed base of Microsoft systems will be less than one per cent of all devices.

Google God

In its place, Google will rise as the new colossus, and at some point in the next ten years, it will quietly change ‘don’t be evil’ from its informal motto to its third directive, behind ‘don’t get caught’ and ‘don’t forget, we know where you live’.

Of course, Google makes its money from advertising, and advertising needs us to buy stuff, or the whole thing breaks down. But Google is everywhere now.

The Chrome operating system is only part of it; Google has essentially replaced the domain name system (DNS). It’s already quicker to type ‘Facebook’ into the Google search bar than type ‘www.facebook.com’ into the address bar.

In ten years there won’t be an address bar, just Google, and without the address bar, there is no point in registering domain names. They will still work of course, but you won’t use them any more than you use numeric IP addresses now.

Google will sell its own name system that’s much cheaper than a dot com and allows spaces, punctuation and mixed case. Better still, because it shows up on the search results, there’s no requirement for each name to be unique.

If you register a word or phrase, you’ll appear in a separate section on the results page, but anybody else can also register that same phrase and appear there as well.

You can’t choose your position on the list; it’s determined for each person searching, based on how significant you are to them. This makes it impossible to cybersquat, but of course, if you have to be top, it’s easy enough to slightly change the wording of your Googlename.

Googlenames automatically link to your Google+ page by default and every Googlename comes with its own Gmail address. Even if you don’t want to register one for your business, there is really no reason not to have one for yourself.

In ten years’ time, it will already be quite common for parents to register a Googlename for their child at birth. The simple act of tying your Googlename to your Google+ account will kill Facebook.

There will be a big anti-trust lawsuit about it, but by the time it’s all settled, everyone will be used to Google+ anyway and Facebook will never recover.

Gaming IRL

In 2017, 10 years after its existence was confirmed, Blizzard will finally release its next-gen MMO. It will be extremely polished and a lot of fun to play, but it will just be a massively multiplayer FPS set in a science fiction universe, which makes it essentially just Planetside, 15 years after we already had Planetside.

Meanwhile a new game genre will emerge. In the 80s we had the platformer; the 90s were all about RTS, and in the ’00s it was the FPS. Now we have the augmented reality or AR game. Historians will trace the birth of this genre back to Zombies, Run!, an iOS and Android game released in 2012. This uses story elements and sound effects to immerse you in an imaginary zombie-infested world, while you’re out running in the real world.

Running becomes the input mechanism for the game. You get a mission – to rescue a survivor before the zombies reach him, say – and to do it, you have to go outside and run. Your phone keeps track of how far and how fast you run, and plays in-game audio to let you know how well you’re doing and how far behind the zombies are.

Zombies, Run! was a first-generation AR game. The running mechanic was like tapping the spacebar; the game didn’t care where you ran, only how much you ran. That’s because it was, at its heart, a running program and the developers didn’t want to interfere with your existing routes. But later games will add GPS so that objectives appear at specific street intersections, and time-sensitive missions that can only be completed at night.

Your phone camera becomes a scanner to reveal things that exist at specific real-world locations, but which are only visible in the game world. These could be crime scene clues or power-ups, or it could reveal which people are also playing the same game as you – either as allies or enemies.

AR doesn’t need to waste developer time and computing resources rendering a virtual world; it repurposes the existing world. This totally redefines the gaming landscape.

Gamers aren’t couch-dwelling slobs anymore, they are delusional paranoiacs, running wild in streets. That’s not necessarily better, but it’s definitely different.

Mac OS X Mountain Lion: what you need to know

Apple has today released details of its next-gen OS. Dubbed Mountain Lion, it’s the follow-up to OS X 10.7 Lion and prior to that Snow Leopard and Leopard.

As such it’s full name will be OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Let’s make one thing clear – this is not a meghat’s striking about Mountain Lion is how much further towards iOS Apple is taking its desktop OS – Mac purists will be rightly concerned that Apple seems to be moving its operating systems together to a point where they will converge, but for the rest of us a unified OS is a tantalising prospect.

“The Mac is on a roll, growing faster than the PC for 23 straight quarters, and with Mountain Lion things get even better,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing in a statement.

“The developer preview of Mountain Lion comes just seven months after the incredibly successful release of Lion and sets a rapid pace of development for the world’s most advanced personal computer operating system.”

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: release date

Mountain Lion has been released to developers today and should be available for consumers this summer – expect a further announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in early June.

Apple says theMac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion release date is late Summer 2012. As with Lion, Mountain Lion will be available as a download from the Mac App Store.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iOS integration

The new OS incorporates a number of features right from iOS – we had some in Lion of course, but Mountain Lion includes reminders, notifications and Twitter integration as well as Messages, Notes (separate, not within Mail) and Game Center.

Reminders and Notes help you create and track your to-dos across all your Apple devices.
These all sync to iCloud, as does your gaming record in Game Center. More importantly, the arrival of Game Center in OS X means you can play iOS users in the same game. Apple has demoed cross-platform gaming with Reckless Racing – expect many other games to follow suit.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iOS terminology

One of the most striking things about the new OS is how Apple is renaming everything on its desktop OS to fall in line with iOS. So iCal is now called Calendar, while Addresss Book has become contacts, for example.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iCloud integration

Apple says Mountain Lion is the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind for easy setup and integration with apps. Whatever that means.

Well actually what it means is that Mountain Lion will use your Apple ID to automatically set up Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Messages, FaceTime and Find My Mac.

And iCloud will also sync Documents across your devices – any changes are pushed across all your Apple kit so documents are always up to date. Apple has also announced a new API to help developers make document-based apps work with iCloud.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: iMessage

There’s also a Messages app that takes the place of iChat, allowing you to continue conversations started on Mac on any iOS device. iMessages will work much as they do on iPad. Again, messaging is unlimited between Macs and iOS devices.

This includes high-quality photos and videos, while the Messages app will continue to support AIM, Jabber, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk. The continued support for the later is especially pleasing.

What’s more, any Mac OS X Lion user can get hold of a beta of Messages from apple.com. The final version will be available with Mountain Lion.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Notifications

Mountain Lion also nicks notifications from iOS. Again there’s a Notification Center that provides easy access to alerts from Mail, Calendar, Messages, Reminders, system updates and third party apps.

And, just like in iOS, you pull it across from the right of your desktop. Developers will be able to bake in support for this in their own apps.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Safari

Safari now gets the ability to search right from the address bar, just as you can in Chrome and Firefox.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Share Sheets

A new feature, called Share Sheets, is supposed to make it easy to share links, photos and videos directly from Apple and third party apps. Sounds like a clipboard to us. However, it enables you to share various types of content with whoever you choose. The interesting thing here is that Apple has partnered with Flickr for photos and Vimeo for video.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Twitter integration

And, of course, there’s Twitter. The service is integrated throughout Mountain Lion so you can sign on once and tweet directly from all your apps including Safari, Quick Look, Photo Booth, Preview and third party apps.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: AirPlay mirroring

Following on from other attempts at computer-based wireless displays, such as Intel’s WiDi, Mountain Lion introduces AirPlay Mirroring. You’ll be able to mirror your computer screen on a TV wirelessly, though you’ll need an Apple TV to connect through. There’s 720p HD support (although other systems do support 1080p, Apple TV doesn’t) and supposedly amazing realtime response rates for gamers using the mirroring app.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Gatekeeper

Think there’s no need for security software on a Mac? Think again. Apple has introduced a new security feature called Gatekeeper that allows for personalised security settings, working as a kind of safety net for less confident users by offering a setting that allows the Mac to accept only software downloaded from the Mac App Store.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for developers

Apple says it has created hundreds of new APIs for OS X 10.8. As well as that iCloud Documents API we talked about earlier, the Game Kit APIs tap into the same services as Game Center on iOS, making it possible to create multiplayer games that work across Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

There’s a new graphics infrastructure underpins OpenGL and OpenCL and implements GLKit from iOS 5, to make it easier to create OpenGL apps.

What more is there? “Using Core Animation in Cocoa apps is easier than ever, and new video APIs deliver modern 64-bit replacements for low-level QuickTime APIs. Enhanced Multi-Touch APIs give developers double-tap zoom support and access to the system-wide lookup gesture. Kernel ASLR improves security through enhanced mitigation against buffer overflow attacks,” says Apple.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion for Chinese users

China is now a massive market for Apple. And as such Mountain Lion introduces new support for Chinese users, “including significant enhancements to the Chinese input method and the option to select Baidu search in Safari.”

Apple has also announced easy account setup for some of China’s biggest email service providers including QQ, 126 and 163.

Chinese users can also upload video via Share Sheets directly to video websites Youku and Tudou, and while we like Twitter, there’s system-wide support for Sina weibo.

Touch in Windows 8

Ubiquitous access to touch-enabled devices is going to mean every Windows game developer on planet earth will be looking to integrate touch features into their latest release.

So we can take a look at how touch-enabled systems will run Windows 8, enhance your gaming experience and generally make the world a better place.

There’s simply no arguing that Microsoft – publisher of the single most important OS on the planet – has been utterly routed by the more nimble Apple and Google.

It may have released touch-enabled systems years ago with Windows Mobile and Windows Tablet Edition, but in its usual blinkered this-is- to-sell-more-Windows way managed to kill the market dead for these and many other innovative products. Anyone remember Microsoft Smart Display? Or project Courier?

This time around touch will be different. Microsoft doesn’t have to innovate, phew, as Apple and Android has done all of that for it. We can just sit back, relax and wait for the touch-enabled, app-store-integrated, widget-brandishing, button-sliding progeny of Windows to make its appearance.

The odd thing is, it’s really rather exciting. For the first time we’re going to have the chance at a genuine ecosystem of Windows devices to choose from: moving from Windows phones, to Windows tablets up to netbooks and laptops and then desktop systems. All touch-enabled, all interconnected via Windows Live and all offering the same touch games and applications.

Next generation hardware is already appearing so let’s take a look at how touch-devices work with Windows 8, existing and future games.

The gloss-black MSI all-in-one flares into life. The remnants of an ancient BIOS briefly shows itself – still infecting even this most modern of machines – before a Metro-style pale-blue OS boot menu presents itself. Its uber-modern fine sans-serif type couldn’t be more removed from the chunky fixed-type on BIOS screens of old.

Tap the extra options and you see a selection of recovery and boot features, before going back and tapping the frame-less Windows 8 button to start it. Within seconds a widescreen HD mountain vista is displayed, the date and time boldly displayed in that stylish new Segoe typeface.

A swipe up reveals the Windows user accounts, ideally tied to Windows Live accounts they will take your preferences, avatar images, email, documents and apps with you to any device you use. Tapping one brings up the visual lock-screen – a personalised picture that requires you to motion over areas you’ve previously selected to gain full user access.

Security passed, the new Windows 8 Start Menu springs forth; this living breathing menu emanates life, as individual app cards update and refresh themselves. Feeds show real-time posts and games show online players stats.

The expansive, horizon-style Start Menu can be effortlessly scrolled through, with a tap here you can check your tweets, a tap there you can scroll through your latest news streams.

Media Center makes it a simple job to flick through menus of media and choose the music, photos and films you want to view. Tap the latest Windows Store, grab a game and enjoy gaming in a new way.

Hands on with Windows 8

The release of Windows 8 will simply solidify this touch journey but for now models, such as the MSI Wind Top AE2210 or the Dell Inspiron 2320 – both all-in-one models – elegantly show the touch-enabled future that awaits as they can have the Windows 8 Developer Preview installed on them.

We know the Developer Preview was really a beta version but even so, the semantics of a number of gestures were a little unnecessarily obscured. Using it you get a better idea that the demo at last year’s Microsoft Build conference while live had been well practised and orchestrated.

We regularly ran into issues trying to switch between apps and the dock system seemed limited and frustrating to use. But it’s hard to complain about something that hasn’t even been released in an official form. Even guessing, there’s no chance of a Windows 8 release until summer 2012. Microsoft has a lot to sort out before then beyond just getting a swanky touch-interface working correctly.

The Windows Store is probably the easiest, cross-device migration of settings and is another easy thing to sort via Windows Live accounts.

But it’s the often overlooked elements of life where pleasure can really be taken, like reading on the toilet or removing an annoying bogey from your nose. Our old-friend Windows Media Centre is an excellent touch-enabled bit of software.

Whether that’s through luck or flaw we can’t say, but flicking through films, music and photos is a lovely experience. One we’re sure could be made even better if a little style and thought was put into it.

The Media Center photo screensaver is still one of the worst experiences we’ve had besides hiding under our bed covers as children listening to our parents fight.

Windows playtime

Where our real interest lies is with gaming. Touch on mobile devices has ushered in a new way to game. While we’re not expecting the same paradigm shift on the desktop, access to casual mobile games will always be a good thing, but we do expect touch elements to start drip feeding into triple-A titles.

The splendid thing is we can already try some of these features out on existing titles, that have been either knowingly or unwittingly enabled for touch gaming. The richest area of gaming for touch-aware titles is the hated casual game, you can stop making hissing noises. Some people – we imagine a few of those that have racked up over half a billion downloads of Angry Birds – actually do like what we deridingly call ‘casual’ games.

With many Flash-based browser games designed for easy mouse input, or more likely for touch-aware input, these are all able to work flawlessly with a touch PC. We’ve already mentioned the most obvious casual game: Angry Birds. This has a free PC version online at chrome.angrybirds.com that works on any HTML5-aware browser and plays beautifully on touch-screen equipped PCs and on a much larger scale than any tablet or phone could hope to manage on its own.

We did run into a few odd instances with Internet Explorer, it has its own touch-controls built in and a wrongly-placed finger can have you browsing off to other locations. Equally well-equipped are the flash-based games to be found over at www.popcap.com the likes of Bejeweled and Plants Vs Zombies, these Flash games again work perfectly on a touch-enabled PC.

It’s also worth pointing out the browser add-in Swiffout.com that enables you to run embedded Flash games full screen. It’s a bit hit and miss, as in it’ll sometimes seem like the game isn’t doing anything.

If you think there’s a big selection of casual games available online now, just you wait until Windows 8 hits the streets. We’d expect most Windows Phones games to be quickly ported, that’s if they’re not natively supported from day one, while dedicated Windows 8 Tablet games are going to quickly appear.

If casual gaming is your thing, if nothing else children gobble them up like space-dusted cake, then expect a flood to come in from Android and iOS devices.

Touch in mainstream games

Fortunately, touch is coming to mainstream gaming too. Well, it’s actually already here but it’s either surreptitious or else it’s accidental, but we’re still claiming it’s real.

The formats that are going to gain the most outside of the casual arena are adventures and strategy games. You may have spotted that both of these have the advantage that they’re not necessarily the fastest paced of games.

The big issue, particularly for RTS games but can even affect adventures too, is that a quick-tap is equivalent to a left-click and a long-tap performs a right-click. This effectively eliminates the ability to do quick right-click actions.

Most dedicated touch devices have developed alternatives, such as the two-finger tap or hold one finger down and tap second. Unless a game is developed with touch in mind, you’re stuck with what Windows 7 has to offer, and that’s limited.

Even with these limitations many adventure games and less hectic strategy games play wonderfully on a touchscreen. If anything we love the switch you can make between active moments using the mouse and more contemplative sections using the touchscreen interface.

The same type of system goes for some RPGs as well, though many tend to lean heavily on mouse and keyboard. Non-combat areas such as inventory management, spell casting or crafting can all take advantage of touchscreen input.

One genre of gaming that we’re not expecting touch to have an impact on is first person shooters. This a PC genre that is very much going to stay a realm of the mouse and keyboard. That’s not to say touch systems aren’t able to run them, and in a similar way to RPGs we can see room within FPS titles to add extra interactivity into the game world by using touch within environment.

Take Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which has a world littered with supposedly interactive elements from touch newspapers to hackable door locks. To make these mouse accessible the game almost has to cut away from the world so you can click on the right parts with the mouse, with a touchscreen they’d be no need and you could directly interact with the game world.

The same goes for any games with in-world elements, while touch could be used for physical game-world interaction. So picking up and manipulating items via touch to complete physics puzzles or just completing a weapon loadout.

None of this in itself is going to change the world, but it’s certainly going to change how you play in your gaming worlds.

Touchy me, touchy you

Like us, many of you will be thinking ‘I’m never going to lean forward and touch my screen’. You’re probably right, it’s a lot of effort and not entirely natural thing to do, especially when sitting down.

We’re sure touchscreens will appear but direct touch could well be limited to tablets and all-in-one systems. However, Kinect and the Acer Aspire Z5xxx range, with their front-facing cameras, show a way of interacting that cuts out that bacteria filled touching business with seemingly reasonable precision.

We used the Windows 8 Developer Preview and those two up-to-date all-in-one touch panel PCs mentioned previously: the MSI Wind Top AE2210 is a lovely Intel Core i3 2100 Sandy Bridge graphics, 20-inch unit, which sells for a little over £650.

The Dell Inspiron 2310 is more up-market with an improved Intel Core i5 and Nvidia GT 525M graphics chipset. This has a little more muscle but is also a little more pricey, selling at around £799.

Interestingly both use what we suspect is the same two-point touch sensor. We suspect this is an IR-based system as they both detect finger movement before contact is made and there was vague issues with accuracy at the extreme edges of the screen.

That aside both worked flawlessly with the Windows 8 Developer Preview OS indeed they were both as fast as when used under Windows 7. Tablets and phones are going to continue to be the main focus for touch, but we’re waiting to see what trickles down to the PC.