Touch screens are (relatively) expensive.

Touch screens significantly reduce the brightness and contrast of the screen.
This translates directly to signifcant power consumption as well.

Touch screens get touched (fingerprints).

Touch screens your hand gets in the way of the screen.

So they are not unalloyed wonderful things, at least with current technology.

Understand that I use them on iPAQ's all the time.  But they are
not unalloyed wonderful things.  You use them where you don't have viable
alternatives right now....  Tablet PC's are in this catagory; they
can be used when one hand is holding the device and the other using it..

If you could fix the cost and degredation of the screen problems, they'd
be alot more popular on laptops.....
                                - Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
Jim.Gettys at hp.com

> Sender: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> From: Sean Charles <bibbers at onetel.net.uk>
> Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 19:17:38 +0000
> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Subject: Re: Tablet PCs
> -----
> >
> > 1. Why has the mouse remained so popular when it's clearly inferior to
> > just directly pointing (even with a stylus)?  Surely the technology of
> > the digitizer has gotten much cheaper over the years.  It can't be just
> > a cost issue anymore.
> >
>
> I couldn't agree more! Personally I can't understand why touch screens
> aren't de rigeur. I once developed a touch-screen based system and the
> 'paradigm' of interaction is so string that when returning from the
> shopfloor to my development PC I very often found myself touching the
> monitor and then realising it wasn't a touch screen!
>
> Given 'economies of scale' i can't understand why every laptop doesn't
> come with a touch screen as standard. I think that would be an amazing
> way forward for personal computing.
>
> Mind you, most of the time these days I want to touch the PC, with a
> hammer...
>
> Sean Charles.