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 exp...

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