Finally on July 7th 2009, I had a chance to touch the Next Generation Device. Microsoft Surface Reached our Kochi office. We were so eager to see the Ultimate machine.. the box came through courier and we had to lift the heavy thing from the ground floor to our office at the 3rd floor. We realized that its no kids game as the table weighed 160 Kg and its fragile.

The well packed tablel din't fit into our lift with its huge box.. so we had to take it out of the box and move it into the lift and bring it up to the 3rd floor.
The funny part began when it reached our office and we all started to fix it and connect it to see the machine working. Our System administrator Mr. Renjith had some documents ready to refer. Thanks to him atleast that reduced our effort a lot. Well first we had to find the switch to turn the machine on.. The switch was discovered by one of my colleague after 20 minutes of search. It is right at the bottom on the table on the left corner facing the floor. We switched it on and few colorful lights came up but nothing else happened. Then we figured that we need to run the Surface shell . We commected an external monitor a mouse and a keyboard. Untill u run the shell its just another vista machine... Finally we could get the thing running and we could feel the image viewer application running in it. Now a days we do test our own applications on Microsoft Surface before delivering to our US Office.. it is really exiting to see and feel our applications working on a surface table which respond to multi touches and gestures.
As a designer i could understand the difference in designing interface for a surface application. There are no mouseover events or the color change effects.. elements are bigger in size natural in moments and layouts. Scattered views free flow scrollbars and list boxes.. Elements which are shy in nature which reponse with a giggle when touched.. i can give a much explanatory blog about designing for Natural User Interfaces later.