The next frontier of devices and interaction.

One way to look at the Post-PC future is that it's really all about input modality and interface - rather than device or content.

In this view of the world, Apple’s particular achievement in the last five years is that it *nailed* multi-touch input and the corresponding touch interface – the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store all flowed on from this breakthrough. Others were trying to make their existing phone UI more usable, better looking form factors, phones that incorporated music players, and Swiss-Army-knife arrays of peripheral features. Smartphones, PDAs and tablet PCs were all coming out with styluses. Jobs and Apple changed the game with a revolutionary step up in input and interface.  (How many Post-PC computing devices do you see coming out with a stylus or hard keyboard today?)

This not just my idiosyncratic point of view, by the way. The iPhone Wikipedia entry contends “Development of the iPhone began in 2005 with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens” providing multiple citations.

The next frontiers are gesture and voice.

Kinect and Siri are streets ahead in these respective areas. No matter what you think of their current state of either, the bucket loads of real-world data they are collecting is invaluable for improving the underlying algorithms; and hence the navigation/interaction experience. These datasets are something a would-be competitor can’t get by any other means.

Both Kinect and Siri are out there in a big way. Kinect holds the 2011 Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history, while the quarter following the release of Siri on the iPhone 4S saw unprecedented iPhone sales of over 37 million units.

The question, then, is - What lucrative new devices, markets and business models will gesture and voice unlock for their successful pioneers?

In my opinion, if you *nail* voice (not just word recognition but the syntactic problems), you win mobile search. Siri is Apple seriously cutting Google's grass, at least as much as Android does vice versa.

 And if you want to win internet TV (and who wouldn’t want to own an App Store on the baby boomers’ favourite device), you need to *nail* gesture. Actually, it will be probably a combination of gesture AND facial recognition AND voice that proves the killer breakthrough for TVs and public screens as computing devices.

Apple rumours hint at some combination of inputs for the mooted Apple TV. And besides, 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy has already hilariously illustrated why voice alone mightn’t quite cut it.