Touch Screen Laptop – Will iPad Lead the Herd?
The touch screen laptop used to be the tool of the business sector, only lately did manufacturers realized the true potential of these devices and while the word is still out if the iPad can even be considered a laptop, they definitely took a brave step forward and put something out they thought will work. So far it has been a great success thanks to its snappy hardware and software, and the good guess at the market.
Apparently the average user needs a laptop to do only a handful of things but they demand it does them fairly quickly and for a long time, they don’t like laptops that are heavy and go flat in four hours of use. Experts are still having debates whether the device is good for anything in particular or it is the single most important innovation in the history of personal computing, one fact is hard to fight against.
Apple made sure the device does everything they intended it for quickly and perfectly. While this approach limits the use of the computer, there is no flash support just to mention one focal point of the battles out there; it is definitely snappy when it comes to checking e-mails, or browsing. If you are familiar with iPhone, imagine that it is just like the 3GS version with a big screen and software designed to take advantage of it. The user interface is simple and fluid enough to give it to less experienced users, my grandma learned how to use the mobile phone all by herself, and she is 73, I don’t think she would have trouble chatting with us using this device.
This is where the touch screen laptop used to come short. It was expensive and expressedly aimed at business users; therefore no one took the initiative to make a user interface that is intuitive and easy to use. Windows runs on most of the other solutions and while it is rather easy to get used to, it still takes some tech savviness to set up a wireless connection or install a new piece of software. If you factor in the touch screen the chaos is inevitable. The basic windows interface – not that much so in windows 7 – is designed to be used with a pointing device, a mouse for example. There are small buttons close to each other, I find my way around in all versions of windows but I would still have hard time trying to complete even the most basic tasks poking a touch screen of this sort.
Touch screen laptops are not perfect, they are far from it and tablets are even more in their early days than other varieties, but the demand is certainly there and Apple demonstrated it very well selling around 400,000 units in just a couple of days.
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