Welcoming the new touchscreen laptop

I recently bought a touch screen laptop from the US. We commonly use a tablet for browsing, games & other fun stuff. But typing on it if you must type seriously & create large, detailed documents is a real pain. While there are peripherals that can be used to overcome this limitation, operating systems such as Android, iOS are very limited when it comes to doing any serious work. While an Android system can be at least connected via USB to a computer, a much touted device like ipad falls short of any capabilities that don’t use the internet. Like changing one’s religion, one has to give up all of one’s beliefs & ways of working to adopt an Apple machine, which isn’t for me in this lifetime. 

This is where the new generation of touch screen Windows 8 based laptops is really fantastic, giving one the option of browsing, playing games, watching photos, videos, etc using the touch screen option, while the keyboard continues to remain, allowing one to do some ‘serious’ work as well. Since the operating system is Windows, it has none of the limitations of Android, which really speaking isn’t meant for computing, though it may come close in many aspects. So, one would use the touch screen for everything except typing, including moving the mouse around. One would use the mouse when high precision movements are needed. This can also potentially prevent some of the wrist injuries due to prolonged contact with surfaces for use of the mouse & keyboard.

One can go further advanced & try out laptop cum tablet designs, where the laptop screen can be folded in some patented way to convert the device into a tablet. These tend to be much more expensive though & one invariably ends up sacrificing many of the laptop features such as a DVD drive & screen size to make way for the convertible tablet. 

In the future it is very likely that displays will be floating in the air, making 3D objects which can be moved around. Imagine presentations being in 3D, excel sheets with rows & columns having a third dimension of being stacked up! Such a revolution would make things much more ‘physical’ in terms of input & output.

Some tips for those looking to buy a laptop:

• Try really hard to get it from the US, looking for a sale where you can save 50-70% & not a paltry 10-15% as offered in Indian online stores, that too only if you’re lucky
• If you must buy in India, wait for online sale and/or look for credit card cash back offers
• Keep browsing outlet stores of major manufacturers especially Lenovo & Dell, looking for new, unopened laptops
• Register & create alerts using keywords on slickdeals
• Definitely get a touch screen laptop, whether convertible to a tablet or not depends on your priorities. Goes without saying – get used to Windows 8 or wait for a later version
• Stretch your budget to get a SSD or if that isn’t likely, get a SSD combo drive for faster caching
• Having learnt it the hard way, I find going for a business laptop makes a lot of sense, even for home usage as these are much more reliable, are constructed robustly & come with better support
• Get a high res screen as this cant be easily / cheaply upgraded later. Surprisingly in India, specs on sites don’t even mention screen resolution!
•  Low amount of RAM is ok, as long as it can be upgraded
• Finally, don’t spend too much on a laptop (unless you really need high end specs) as sooner or later it will conk out (maybe few years to a decade) & by then anyway technology would be so far advanced that you will be tempted to upgrade