Dial It Up: This is the Most Innovative Surface Product Yet

Microsoft enthusiasts are understandably going ga-ga over the expensive Surface Studio. But in doing so, they’re missing out on the biggest Surface innovation ever. Yep. I’m talking about Surface Dial.

Regardless of your stance on the crazy-expensive Surface Studio—it’s either aspirational, delusional, or both—you’ve probably not grasped the singular greatness of Surface Dial yet.

The reasons for this are simple. Too many are comparing it to an ancient and borderline-useful Mac peripheral called the Griffin PowerMate. And with its hockey puck-like shape, the Dial comes off as being even more unnecessary than the Surface Studio along which it was announced.

Don’t be fooled. The impact of Surface Dial will far exceed that of Surface Studio in the long run. In fact, I think the impact of Surface Dial will exceed that of anything the Surface team has done so far.

Yes, I’m serious.

To understand why this is so, consider what Surface Dial really is, a completely new way for users to interact with computing devices. An interface that is natural and obvious, and discoverable, and one that augments the natural power and versatility of the PC.

This is amazing stuff, folks.

We’re all familiar with the decades-old methods for interacting with PCs. We type on keyboard, and we navigate with mice and other pointing devices effortlessly.

On more modern PCs, multi-touch and pen capabilities have augmented these familiar if old-fashioned interaction methods. And while older PC users, set in their ways, will argue that touch and pen are unnecessary or at best simply secondary, that is not the case at all. Today, far more people interact with more personal computing devices, like phones and tablets, using only touch than do PC users with keyboards and mice. And on PCs, switching between touch and more traditional interfaces is both seamless and natural. You may think you don’t need touch, but once you’ve experienced it, even on traditional PC form factors, you miss it when you use another PC without those capabilities.

Pen, to date, has proven a bit trickier. The issue is that pen seems to address a much more limited market: Creatives, perhaps, or those old fashioned note-takers who, for whatever reason, are more comfortable with the keyboard than with handwriting. Not helping matters, most schools, at least here in the U.S., no longer even teach cursive handwriting. Writing by hand, it seems, is becoming a lost art.

But studies have shown that those who take notes by hand, rather than type on a keyboard, do a better job of retaining the information they are recording. That is, when you type, you can often capture everything the speaker is saying, in essence creating a transcription. But because someone taking notes by hand cannot keep up with the speaker, they need to process what’s being said, and can only note the highlights. In doing so, they remember what was said better.

I won’t bore you with my early and ongoing explorations into taking notes by hand again, and for the first time in over 20 years. But one of the things I’ve noticed in using a pen with a PC is that it’s an all or nothing affair. That is, when you switch to the pen, you’re pretty much just using the pen. This contrasts sharply with the experience of using the keyboard, mouse/pointing device, and touch, where you can move between each easily.

The genius of Surface Dial is that it makes the pen less of an all-or-nothing experience. It extends the natural feeling of using a pen with a new yet still natural digital experience you can engage in with your other hand. And while I have not personally experienced this, it’s hard not become excited by the possibilities of firing up both sides of your brain and seamlessly moving between the two devices in your hands.

This kind of innovation requires a symbiosis between the hardware and the software, and while earlier Surface devices have obviously lived in this matrix, the Surface Dial in many ways is the most extreme example of why doing both is important. On its own, or with poorly-made software, Surface Dial is useless or nearly so. But with deep OS integration, Surface Dial springs to life and becomes incredibly useful, even necessary.

But the best part about Surface Dial, arguably, is that it isn’t touch. So if you are one of those people who is still unsure or even untrusting of touch on PCs, consider the following: After experimenting with touch interfaces in cars, most car makers have now started augmenting or even replacing their touch-based interfaces with physical interfaces that work better and more precisely. This starts, as it always does, with luxury cars. Which is what Surface is in the PC world. I hope to see it come downmarket quickly, and to third parties.

Regardless of how or when that happens, Surface Dial still respects the natural order of things in the PC space—again, in a way Surface Studio does not—by not be limited to a single device type. Current Surface Book and Surface Pro users can use it too. That’s excellent.

If Surface Dial works out the way I believe it will, we can credit Microsoft for doing something Apple pretends to do with the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro: Creating an entirely new PC user experience that will work seamlessly with the interfaces with which users are already familiar. It’s not a baby step, but a revolution. And that it comes from Microsoft, not Apple, is just the icing on the cake.