In Los Angeles

MICROSOFT has caught up with science fiction.

Remember movies like Star Trek where the characters touch their fancy monitors to activate their warp drives, or Minority Report where Tom Cruise starts sliding virtual windows up, down and around with his hands?

Microsoft's upcoming operating system, Windows 7 does just that.

Okay, maybe the warp drive and future predicting elements of the films are still light years away. But with touch screen devices like phones and music players, it was only a matter of time before touch screen computers and monitors were introduced.

Yes, HP has its Touch Smart computer, but what Windows 7 does is to merge software and touchscreen hardware. In a demo at this week's PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, several Microsoft folks demonstrated how the touch screen worked, in conjunction with several other upgrades from the much maligned Windows Vista operating system.

On the surface, touching the screen to move icons and opening files by tapping them is like using the mouse – nothing major has changed.

But there are several nuances.

Flick a minimised window to the top of the screen and the software recognises that you're trying to expand it and does so automatically.

Push an open window to the edge of the screen and it maximises the window to fit half the screen, allowing you to do the same with another application on the other side.

With a mouse, this is still possible but at a hands on demo, it felt very natural to start tossing and flicking things across and around a screen, and seeing them pop up and about.

Instead of tapping the down arrow on the address bar on Internet Explorer for example, you can touch the address bar itself to generate a list of previously viewed sites. Cough up a list of applications the same way and anything is just a slight nudge away.

And like a certain competitor phone whose name we shall not mention, scrolling through pictures is as simple as a left or right finger flick. 

Windows 7 also allows you to use both your hands and mouse to run things but by using the touchscreen, icons and text are enlarged by 25 per cent, for those with huge fingers.

Now, there are other new things about Windows 7 revealed at PDC - but hey, it's only been 30 minutes into the presentation this Tuesday morning.

For more exclusive sneak previews of Windows 7, pick up a copy of next week's Digital Life (on November 5th). In the meantime, you might want to hold back on buying that sparkling new, but soon to be outdated, flat screen computer monitor.