Contact structures on product manifolds

Contact structures, by virtue of their nonintegrability, are better adapted to twisted products (fibre bundles) than cartesian products. In this talk I shall discuss a construction of contact structures on products of $S^1$ with manifolds admitting a suitable decomposition into exact symplectic pieces. Such a decomposition will be shown to exist for symplectic 4-manifolds. This is joint work with A. Stipsicz.