Props to the Nieman Journalism Lab for this video from the New York Times R&D Lab on their use of Surface. Sure it’s a Surface 1.0 unit as 2.0 isn’t out in the wild yet but this is one way (not the only way) I’d like to read my newspaper. At Casa Clayton, we currently have a PC in the kitchen that is used to keep in touch with news from the motherland (UK) and we often find ourselves discussing stories but this would be a much nicer way to do it – at high resolution on a big screen with lots of manipulation capability. I experimented with consuming my news on an iPad recently and for sure that slate format works well too and is more portable than this but the large format and ability for multi person multi touch, would be brilliant* in our kitchen. John Cook at GeekWire agrees so that’s two customers!
With Surface 2.0** this could be even better as that unit is housed in Gorilla Glass and resilient to water (to a degree). I could imagine placing my coffee cup down and beneath it the latest UK sports news is displayed. As my wife puts her coffee cup down, her favorite UK newspapers and magazines are shown.
So much potential.
* gratuitous use of a British-ism
** in a weird coincidence, a Surface golf shirt just showed up at my desk.
