Back in 1996 or so I was sitting in the front row of the old Aladdin hotel in Las Vegas, listening to Bill Gates give the keynote address at Comdex. For those of you of a tender age Comdex was once the biggest business convention in the world, five days of madness in which as many as a couple of hundred thousand people would descend on Vegas to find out what was going in the world of technology.

Gates talked about the future. I wish I had a video of that now. The future was bright and shiny. We'd have a new 'input device' for the things around us, and it would be the human voice. Computer... find me a hotel in Schenectady, not more than $75 a night with a view. Computer... track down Bernie and inform him he's fired. Computer... you get the drift.

Fourteen years on and we still can't do that. Instead we're looking at a new 'paradigm' for telling our machines what to do. The iPad typifies it as this excellent piece from Cult of Mac demonstrates&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/for-writing-and-real-work-ipad-needs-keyboard-dock-review/37984"><cite>For Writing and Real Work, iPad Needs a Keyboard Dock [Review] | Cult of Mac</cite></a>]

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<a href="http://www.cultofmac.com/for-writing-and-real-work-ipad-needs-keyboard-dock-review/37984" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/img_9172.jpg"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/img_9172-tm.jpg" width="500" height="332" alt="IMG_9172.jpeg"></a>

It's called touching the screen. Don't faff with the mouse. Just waggle your finger around the monitor instead. And note that, at the moment, that's <i>all</i> you can do with the iPad. There is no option for a mouse, though surely one will appear.

Would you want to write with a setup like this? Not me. The point about the iPad is it's light and portable. That ceases to be of much use if you have to lug around a dock and a Bluetooth keyboard too. Yes, I know they don't weigh much. But it's three bits of kit, any of which you can drop or lose. How is this better than a laptop when it comes to work (I'm not talking about doing all that content stuff the iPad's supposed to be good for here -- I'm talking about <i>input)?</i>

Worse though, for me anyway, is that loss of a mouse and its replacement with a touchscreen. A phone with a touchscreen is fine -- my HTC Desire works very well like that. But a computer screen?

Two issues...
<ul>
	<li>You get grubby finger marks all over it which, after a while, will annoy the hell out of you. <a href="http://www.reghardware.co.uk/Design/page/hub/hpts201004/" title="" target="_blank">Take a look at this demo here</a> and ask yourself: how smeared would the screen be after a few goes of that?</li>
	<li>Reaching up and running your finger around a screen like this is <i>more</i> work than a mouse, not less</li>
</ul>
I spend a lot of time at the computer. Ergonomics are important to me. I currently use a standard Apple wired keyboard (the wireless one is too small) and a Logitech Performance wireless mouse. That's a clever mouse, and fits my hand a lot better than Apple's wireless one. It can do mouse things, search on words, move backwards and forwards in pages, all sorts of stuff...

Why would I abandon that for running my grubby fingers across a screen only to get bugged by the smears there?

Touchscreens seem to be all the rage. HP are among those bringing out desktop models for Windows users like this Touchsmart 600 which will cost you around £1200.

<img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/hp-touchsmart-600.jpg" width="500" height="424" alt="HP TouchSmart 600.jpeg">

This does have a mouse of course. But you're still meant to sit there flicking through pictures and stuff too, getting arm ache along the way and probably having the screen an awkward distance away to see properly.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But what exactly is wrong with a mouse?