What Is A Tablet Laptop
What is a tablet laptop and why do I need one? These questions and more will be answered in this article. Tablet laptops or just Tablets differentiate themselves from laptop and desktop computers in two distinct areas, the first of which is the touchscreen used to interface with the device and the operating system that it runs. Apart from being smaller and more portable they share processors, memory, hard discs, USB ports and more with their larger cousins.
Tablet Laptop: Advantages
What Are Tablet Laptop Advantages
The first big standout advantage of a tablet laptop is its smaller size and more portable nature than even a netbook. Even the iPad is only a pound and a half and wafer thin. While the Nook Color and Samsung Galaxy Tab have a 7” screen size and weigh a pound. Put the iPad in a bag and you probably will not even feel the weight, even with a light case on it. People everywhere in the current environment seem attracted to products that are sleeker and lighter. One of the highest and best advantages of Netbooks was their size and portability. Now that advantage is trumped by Tablet laptops.
Tablet Laptop: Modern Tablets
Modern Tablet laptops most often use a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, older touchscreens could only read a single point of contact and were designed to be used with a stylus. This worked well with older operating systems that were tweaked versions of popular desktop operating systems. The buttons ad widgets on the screen were still mostly based off using a mouse and required the precision of a stylus. Try touching the close window button on your browser with your finger tip without touching the other buttons next to it.
Tablet Laptop: Multi-Touch Screens
Advanced, multi-touch screens allow for multiple points of contact to be used at the same time enabling such applications as virtual keyboards and the ability to re-size and zoom just by using a pinch motion on the screen. Gestures became the default method of navigation as opposed to clicking buttons with a mouse or touching them with a stylus. This made using touchscreens much more natural and allowed for simplified user interfaces that work intuitively, opening the market for these devices to users who aren’t necessarily computer geeks.
Tablet Laptop: Most Common Uses
The most common use for multi-touch screens today is with smart-phones, the most famous example would be the iPhone which in turn led to the iPad tablet. Tablet laptops have been around for a long time but the release of the iPad and it’s subsequent sales figures have led to a revival of a tablet laptop . The multi-touch screen is one of the key components of this revival because of the ease of use it provides and because it does away with any peripherals needed to interact with the device.
Touchscreens work by back lighting a screen with LED or other lights, when a finger or other object touches the screen the light is scattered and this is detected by a camera or other sensor which then triangulates the position of the touch or touches and passes that onto the operating system which then responds to the users request.
Tablet Laptop: Operating Systems
The operating system on your home computer or laptop was designed to be interacted with by a keyboard and mouse. Click spots are small and require the precision that is easily provided by a mouse pointer. Even a cheap mouse has a higher resolution than most monitors so precisely selecting things on the screen becomes second nature after using a mouse for just a little while. Any type of text entry is accomplished with a keyboard not much different than the one found on a typewriter made a hundred years ago.
Using your finger to touch spots on a screen gives you far less precision than a mouse and not having to carry a keyboard or mouse makes tablet laptops more portable than even a laptop.
Tablet Laptop: Older Tablets
Older tablet laptops used slightly modified versions of the same operating systems found on a desktop or laptop, these required a stylus for selecting the tiny buttons and carrying a keyboard around for text entry or using the stylus to select one letter at a time making typing painfully slow.
Tablet Laptop: Constraints
Obviously these constraints made bringing a small, easy to use tablet laptop to market a daunting proposition. The operating system had to be changed to match the low precision input that a touchscreen provides. Multi-touch screens made more commands available and natural gestures a viable system for commanding the operating system. Buttons were made larger and the entire user interface was designed around the hardware. These new operating systems like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android cut their teeth as smartphone interfaces.
Tablet Laptop: User Friendliness
A phone demands easier menus and faster access to things like contact lists and calendars than a tablet laptop does so with each new iteration the software meets more demands of the average user and enhances user friendliness. Modern tablet laptops often use the same operating system found on these smartphones and through the lessons learned in smartphones they are faster and easier to operate than desktop or laptop operating systems though they are not as flexible, especially for the power user used to digging in and tinkering with various parts of the software.
Tablet Laptop: Advances
These two advances in tablet laptops were the most important to bringing about this latest go around with the tablet laptops and because of them we feel they have a much better chance of maintaining the success started by Apple’s iPad.
Tablet Laptop: First Impression
Through television commercials or everyday conversation you are probably hearing more and more about tablet laptops. Seeing an iPad in action for the first time can be an exciting experience and even if it didn’t leave you wanting one immediately it probably got you wondering what you might use one for.
Tablet Laptop: Here To Stay
A tablet laptop is a portable computer that’s smaller and more portable than a laptop, based off the touchscreen and user interface they are more larger cousin to the smartphone than they are smaller cousin to the desktop or laptop computer. While they are not as powerful or flexible as a traditional computer they are smaller, thinner, lighter and more focused. When used in their specific niche tablet laptops are faster and more accessible than a computer.