So I finally got a look at an iPad today. Surprisingly, I haven’t been to the Apple Store at the Glendale Galleria in a long time.

If you’ve owned or even just played with an iPhone or iPod Touch, the idea that the iPad is some kind of new magical device made from ground up unicorn horns will seem like absurd hyperbole. Because the iPad really does look and feel like a gigantic iPod Touch.

But this isn’t meant to downgrade the iPad, but more to point out how magical the iPhone or the iPod Touch is.

Because the multitouch screen is the future.

Now, I was a big fan of Palm and Handspring back in the day. The lure of a handheld computer was too much to resist. Face it, even those now ancient models were up to 100x more powerful and 1000k more capacious than my very first computer, a Commodore 64, which sported a CPU that ran at 1MHz, and 64k RAM. And there was a practical aspect to them: I could keep all sorts of relevant medical info on my person while I rotated through hospitals as a med student.

Sadly, I don’t think Palm or Handspring came any closer to the Holy Grail of mobile computing than the prototypic Apple Newton did before them. Internet connectivity just wasn’t developed enough, and without Internet connectivity of some kind, I really think it’s kind of questionable just how useful that kind of mobility is. Epocrates and all those other medical apps on my Palm really weren’t that much more usable than my dead-tree pocket pharmacopeia or my old school handheld calculator. By the time residency rolled around, I had totally eschewed any sort of electronic accoutrement aside from a pocket calculator. Otherwise, I stuck to good old dead trees and ink.

But the interface of the handheld was a start. We now had a UI paradigm that wasn’t dependent on a keyboard or mouse. I’m not a fan of the stylus, having lost so many of them, but it was a start.

I have always thought that the keyboard and the mouse were clunky interfaces. I never got particularly fast with the keyboard, although I’m probably quick enough to be able to transcribe my thoughts to the screen as they occur. I’m certainly more fluent with the keyboard than I am with writing or with speaking. But this is a function of having interacted with a keyboard since the age of 8. The keyboard has always struck me as a contrived interface, unnatural, mechanical.

The mouse, I’m really not a fan of. I use it because I must in certain venues, but I much prefer using a trackball. The wrist motions involved with mousing around just seem to uneconomical, and actually cause quite a bit of wear and tear on the body. After a few days in a row of using a mouse exclusively, my body starts to ache. This can’t be good. The only interface I hate more than the mouse is the trackpad, which is ironic, because the trackpad is kind of the precursor to the multitouch screen.

It may be a function of growing up in the command-line interface era. For the longest time, I could accomplish most things using keyboard shortcuts and with quick one-liners in the terminal. Even to this day, I usually have at least one terminal window open. If I can get it easily done with a script, I’d rather do that than clicking buttons and moving the pointer all over the screen.

My favorite input devices are actually game pads. I’m actually quite fond of the now standard PlayStation Dual Analog layout. It was overwhelming at first, but now it feels totally natural. Unfortunately, you can’t really simultaneously use a keyboard and a game pad.

Because, truthfully, we’re nowhere near getting rid of the keyboard as an input device. It’s too entrenched, and too many people are used to it. When I was a kid, I thought we’d all be talking to our computers. Voice recognition has probably just within these few years gotten to the point where it would be reliable enough to use as a main input device, but can you really imagine talking to your computer all day long? I think it would drive me nuts. And it would probably be almost completely unusable in a cubicle setting.

So I wasn’t exactly wowed by the iPad. I think they’re cool. I could see myself getting one (although I may very well go for the Wifi one.) But what I was thinking while I was playing with one was: when are we going to see this interface on the newest notebook or desktop?

Frankly, I think the keyboard/mouse/desktop metaphor UI is a dead end. It, like most technological decisions, is an artifact of the hardware available at the time of inception, and the compromises that had to be made in order to keep things affordable. The keyboard is 130 years old. The mouse and the desktop metaphor are around 40 years old. Surely innovation is still possible.

I don’t think it’s just timing that caused previous tablet computer incarnations to fail. (And, to be sure, the jury is still out on the iPad as to whether it can truly be considered a success.) The problem is that the OS is a simple port of the keyboard/mouse/desktop metaphor. There’s nothing I loathe more than using my finger to drag a mouse pointer which is, after all, supposed to represent my finger. The more I think about it, the more dragging seems so barbaric.

One of the most atrocious touch screen interfaces I’ve played with was a Mac-based touch screen. My finger failed to sync with the mouse pointer, and double clicking never seemed to work. Bleh.

In all honesty, I don’t think the multitouch screen would truly replace the keyboard and the mouse if it were employed on a full-featured computer. But I think the OS could be modified to support them. I could certainly see myself using both the touchscreen and the keyboard at the same time. There might even be a role for mouse buttons and the touchscreen at the same time.

Certainly, the multitouch screen is not the end-all, be-all. What I still want is the Minority Report-style interface. But the multitouch screen is the stepping stone. The next move involves haptics. Because who needs a real keyboard if you can synthesize the look and the literal feel of a keyboard. (I’m imagining that the first prototypes will require you to wear a special glove. We’ll all be like Michael Jackson.) After that comes affordable holographic displays. (Now I’m thinking of Hactar from Life, the Universe, and Everything talking about “tricks of the light”.) It’s still a long way off, but I think it would be possible in my lifetime (provided that civilization doesn’t somehow collapse.)