Tablet Laptop

I know it has been awhile, over a year in fact! Wow, it does not seem like that long. Anyways, today I am going to talk to you about tablet laptops. I am attending Virginia Tech as an engineering student, so I was required to purchase a tablet laptop. For those of you who don't know, a tablet laptop is a laptop with a touch screen. I don't think anyone will debate the fact that a touch screen is very cool. Another nice feature of the tablet is you can rotate the screen so that when you close the laptop, the screen is facing up. then you can write on the screen with the stylus(or your finger), and take notes or write or whatever you want. Windows even has a nice little virtual keyboard that will show up on the edge of your screen if you are in tablet mode so you can still type stuff if you want. This little virtual keyboard is very slow to type on though, so I only use it for short little thing like entering user names and passwords. Windows also has some pretty cool handwriting recognition software that will allow you to write in a box and then paste what you wrote as text into other programs. If you are a college student, then the Windows Journal program comes in very handy when you want to take notes. Especially in classes that have odd symbols like math or chemistry. If you were to try to take your notes in
Word or Notepad, it would take either a lot of effort to make those symbols show up correctly. When you are using Journal and a touch screen, it is just like writing on paper. Ok, so it's not just like paper, but it is pretty close. If you have Microsoft OneNote from the Office package, it works pretty well with tablet mode as well.

Enough with the advantages of a tablet, let's talk about the disadvantages. One major disadvantage is the cost, tablet laptops are very expensive for what you get. The one I am using is pretty good, but it was also over $2000. That price tag alone will drive most people away from these devices, and I don't blame them. If I was not required to have one I defiantly would not have spent the money to get one. Another disadvantage is that virtually all tablet laptops have no graphics cards what so ever. Now days, they use the integrated card on Intel's core i3, 5, or 7 processors. These integrated cards are fine if all you want to do is watch movies or surf the web, but if you want to play any modern games, you are screwed. My laptop is only 3 months old and it cannot play Call Of Duty 4 online without massive lag. That is even with all of the settings set to the minimum. So basically if you want to play games, then forget tablet laptops all together. The finial main disadvantage is that tablet laptops seem to only come is relatively small screen sizes. This is probably because touch-screens are so expensive that any larger screens would only make the price even more outrageous, but none the less, a 13 inch screen on a $2000 laptop is some-what annoying.

In conclusion, tablet laptops are nice to have, but if you want to do anything other that take notes and surf the web, then you may want to look into USB touch-pads instead of going all the way to touch screen.

Thanks for reading and please comment.