Microsoft Surface vs. CNN's Magic Wall

John McCain and Barack Obama haven't been discussing tech issues much, but this election season has showcased technology in a different way. Multi-touch, big-screen interfaces are all the rage among the cable news networks -- most notably CNN and its "Magic Wall," which even earned its own Saturday Night Live spoof. More recently, NBC got into the act by bringing in a Microsoft Surface tabletop computer, putting a high-tech sheen on its political coverage.

The concepts are similar, the implementations very different.

CNN's Magic Wall, from Perceptive Pixel, has a vertical orientation that makes for a much more natural feel on camera. In the CNN studios, John King looks like a professor at a very high-tech school. Microsoft doesn't yet offer a vertical Surface commercially, so NBC political director Chuck Todd is relegated to standing behind the horizontal unit, with the image duplicated on a vertical screen, and an overhead shot showing his hands.

However, Todd does get to put those cool chips on the tabletop to bring up different views on the screen. The Surface units can read basic codes on the bottom of those chips and follow preprogrammed instructions based on the codes. (The same approach is used to display information about mobile phones placed on Surface tabletops in AT&T stores.)

See videos from NBC and CNN below, to judge which approach implementation is best.

But the real question is, which network will get the Sphere?