Ever heard of touch screen laptops? No, neither have I. I’ve never seen one either, though I am reliably informed by friends who’ve taken advantage of those internet package with free laptops deals offered by most high street communications stores, that you can get such things and that they rock.I can’t see the difference between a touch screen laptop and a tablet, frankly. Tablets have been around for a couple of years now and are just starting to make the change from gimmicky nonsense to useful piece of kit. As ever with modern mobile communications devices, the first company to get their feet under the table was Apple, whose first iPad was basically a glorified photo album for middle aged business executives.
Now,. A couple of generations in, Apple has managed to come up with a device that works brilliantly for all media and communications based tasks – indeed, in a lot of ways it’s actually better for that than the iPhone and its smart phone compatriots.
The touch screen laptop, or tablet, or whatever you want to call it, is a natural consequence of the fact that smart phones are too small to do anteing on other than send text messages and look at web pages. Basically the tablet is the smart phone for people who have work to do – where you actually need a screen that is of a useful size. Watching movies and looking at pictures on a tablet is outstanding, good enough to review movie clips and images for business purposes as well as entertainment.
The touch screen computer will never replace the keyboard, I’m afraid, not while the written word still exists. Looking at the screen while you are typing is the only way to write – and of course if you did that on a touch screen laptop or tablet you would end up with crippling neck pain. Or you’d have to hold your arms out straight in front of you and type with the tip of one finger.
The tablet is great for communications packages that give you a choice of free laptops – because the tablet is both portable enough to take anywhere and brilliant enough to use in situ. It’s the ultimate communications device but it is not a device for writing on.
Perhaps in future we’ll have experience a weird full circle effect where writing is done on machines that are more like digital versions of the typewriters of old. More likely I suppose is the thought that what we’ll actually end up with are touch screen laptops that have attachable keyboards.
Though again I am not wholly sure that the purpose of writing would be fully served in this case – either because you’d have to hoist the screen up to eye level, which would make touch screen operation pretty pointless (you would be using more muscles to touch the screen than you would if you just used a mouse); or because you would end up powering a separate screen as well as the keyboard.
Ultimately, modern communications devices should probably wake up to the fact that there is a difference between using and sending media, and doing work. How many programmers do you know who write their applications on a touch screen laptop?
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