Tablets vs. laptops
So your laptop is getting old: Should you buy a new one or change horses and try out one of these tablet computers?
That all depends on what you want to do with it.
It’s still the case that laptops and smaller netbook computers are tuned for production — word processing, e-mailing, number-crunching, more complicated tasks that often require a lot of text and switching among several windows running different applications.
Tablets, lacking a mouse or a keyboard, are better for tasks that have simpler tactile and visual elements — like paging through a photo gallery, checking online news or blogs, or reading a digital magazine. In other words, they work better for consumption, and thus can stay on for quite a few hours on one charge.
For social media addicts, tablets will be excellent for browsing through Facebook for the latest photos or links that friends have posted, or checking out Twitter to see what the digital hive mind is buzzing about at that moment.
The iPad in particular has become a hit for casual gaming. Video games like Angry Birds, in which the player tries to knock down rickety structures by shooting birds at them with a large slingshot, can be played with a single fingertip. No complicated controllers required.
When it comes to more serious applications, though, tablets are likely to lag behind netbooks and laptops for the foreseeable future: The devices are not sophisticated enough to seamlessly run multiple programs at once or to allow users to find and install the endless variety of software now available for PCs.
There is a thriving community of iPad “app” developers — the device has close to 40,000 small programs created for it, by some counts. But no such group yet exists for tablets running on Google’s Android operating system, which will constitute most of the new offerings in coming months.
