Versatile input platform

Precision touchpad

While touch provides the best experience for directly manipulating user interfaces and lowers the barrier for content consumption, it is not optimized for all productivity needs. A goal of Windows is to optimize each input mechanism for its strengths, taking advantage of the touchpad's natural precision and other attributes. Precision Touchpads are designed to be used alone or paired with touch, and they are designed to meet users’ growing expectations of the experience on their PCs.

Consistent and reliable

When users sit down at a new PC, the touchpad should work in a familiar and expected fashion. The goal of PTP is to bring that consistency of experience to Windows devices, yet at the same time allow for the exciting breadth of form factors that exist in our ecosystem. Touchpad settings have been added to the modern control panel, providing centralized control in an easy to locate place. Moreover, devices should just work. Users and enterprises do not want to have to find the right driver to get basic functionality. Reliability should be architected for from the ground up. Precision touchpads require no drivers to update, and the experience works out of the box every time.

Familiar, fast, and responsive

Windows 10 PTP leveraged the Windows 8 touch language where it made sense, providing a familiar set of gestures to users. One of the large investments in Windows 8 touch was in DirectManipulation, the component that powers the buttery smooth pan and zoom experience for touch. That same component is utilized with PTP to provide an amazing pan and zoom experience for touchpads that apps get for free and that competitors cannot match. The strengths of touchpads have been optimized – for example, where touch is required to be “stick to your finger”, because touchpads are indirect input devices, there is more flexibility and it can be equally easy to pan very precisely or very quickly to get to the end of a long document. Additionally, the are ecosystem investments in hardware, raising the bar for touchpads. Precision touchpads are more accurate, higher resolution, and lower latency than other devices, and come paired with excellent industrial design.

An experience you don’t want to turn off

One of the top complaints from users is accidental activation. While typing, suddenly a brush of the touchpad will change focus to another app, or the cursor moves and or the text gets chopped up, or worse. Windows 10 PTP invests heavily in addressing this problem and ensures the touchpad never gets in the way of what is trying to be accomplished. Addressing this problem permeates all PTP work and includes efforts in avoiding accidental taps, edge gestures, palms and thumbs resting on the touchpad, and more.

A strong guarantee through hardware compatibility

Precision Touchpads are backed with a strong hardware compatibility program that guarantees a high quality experience matched with great hardware. The device requirements ensure hardware features superior accuracy, resolution, latency, and report rate characteristics. These attributes make the user experience shine. Additionally, Windows collaborated closely with hardware partners around the design and materials used for the experience. The result is an unparalleled integration between materials, hardware engineering, and software platform.