Touch Screen Laptops: A Help or a Hindrance?
Over 80% of the people worldwide are using touchscreen devices such as Smartphones and tablets. The technology is more widespread than anyone could have thought and every innovation involves touch screen facility. Whether we should be ashamed of this lazy attempt to avoid clicking and pressing buttons or be proud of our inventions, that’s still something to ponder about.
The recent development in the world of PC is the entry of touchscreen laptops. The use of the mouse pad and keyboard decreased to a greater level. Laptops can essentially be considered as a tablet most of the time now; a tablet with better performance, of course. But how efficient is this? Does this make us work better in a more productive way?
Well, the popular answer would obviously be, yes! A single swipe can easily navigate you through pages, pinches, and finger dragging would crop and edit pictures. Scrolling, which was never easy on laptops, is made smooth as cream. Your whole world is literally at your fingertips!
Since we are already used in utilizing our touchscreen phones using our fingertips on the screen, it becomes naturally. We do it intuitively, sometimes. When you are in confined spaces and wish to type in something small and press away a send button or likewise, wouldn’t you prefer the touch screen on your laptop?
There are lots of good laptops with this facility in the market, and they are not very expensive. Lenovo Flex 14 and Yoga, for example, has price tags of below 50K. The HP Pavilion notebook is also a pretty attractive deal.
But much like Jobs said in 2010, Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It makes us wonder that maybe we do not want to raise our hands in front of us to use the laptop screen and just prefer to rest our arms on the keypad. And if you are combining typing from a keyboard and navigating using touch, you are just doing extra wrist-work. And if your touchscreen laptop is making you lazy enough to lie on a bed, place your laptop on your belly and use the screen, then you are simply inviting bad posture and worst case, injury.
Touchscreen laptops use glossy glass, which results to watching yourself on the screen instead of that movie you intended to watch, no matter how much you increase the brightness. Sadly, many of these, because of the extra work put in the screen manufacturing, generally tend to be expensive. The battery life of such laptops is worst, and the touch digitizer usually drinks up a lot of power.
And since touchscreen has not gained much popularity yet, what often happens is when you are showing your friend something on the screen, and he/she accidently points at something by touching it, you end up with something to “Undo”. Pictures on Facebook you don’t want to like are liked by mistake, video call buttons are pressed resulting in embarrassing situations and so on. To top it all, if you want to touch a small link and open it, you forget that your fingertip is not a stylus.
It is true that the touchscreen is something that is served as a side dish to the main course of keyboard and mouse, but it goes in vain if it just acts as a hindrance most of the time. Sure it is exciting and may sound cool, but it has got its glitches. So, I think the world can wait till its real need arrives. Maybe that is why they haven’t been hitting the markets in abundance.
