Well, here’s a rather long-winded, but nonetheless revealing review of a stylus and a few ‘drawing’ applications available for the iPad.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ksjKcQm-uk&w=560&h=315]

For me this illustrates nicely one of the major drawbacks of existant touchscreen technologies, namely the lack of precision of the pointer.  Whilst this limitation is only relevant for some domains, and (as can see by global take-up of tablets generally) doesn’t interfere with many common computer uses, it does however make a whole bunch of applications essentially not viable on this platform.

What kind of apps aren’t gonna work when your pointer is a minimum of half a centimetre wide?  Well it’s interesting to speculate.  Off the top of my head, it’s ‘Pro’ applications.  Applications where you need LOTS of screen real estate and lots of precision in controlling small on screen objects.  I’m guessing we’ll never see Photoshop, Logic, ProTools, or Autocad on a tablet computer.  Or at least not while the touch is in it’s current state.

And maybe that’s ok.  Let’s not get snooty about this and recognise that there is a place for different types of computers in our lives.  But this limitation does illustrate how the interface really does restrict the useful domain of a product.