Usefullness of a Touch screen laptop?

[Jim Matthews]

To be clear - I'm a PC user running Win7 pro.

I stay pretty much on the porch.
I'm old enough to remember the first generation Palm Pilot,
and the day I dropped it out of my shirt pocket into the toilet bowl.

I'm not an advocate of access, everywhere.

I'm only suggesting that the tablets are inexpensive,
powerful and easily modified to work like a PC,
with the addition of a keyboard.

[Judson Green]

To be clear - I'm a PC user running Win7 pro.

I stay pretty much on the porch.
I'm old enough to remember the first generation Palm Pilot,
and the day I dropped it out of my shirt pocket into the toilet bowl.

I'm not an advocate of access, everywhere.

I'm only suggesting that the tablets are inexpensive,
powerful and easily modified to work like a PC,
with the addition of a keyboard.

Sure you're absolutely correct and for most of my computing needs my 7" android tablet has me covered, but for CAD drawing and a little desktop publishing my tablet leaves me wanting.

[Judson Green]

Is a Surface Pro 3 something you are thinking about? For the work I do, MS Office is the standard, so Windows is most familiar to me.

I had an old laptop in a docking station, a surface pro, and an iPad. I suffered through that setup for a year or so, but the laptop finally quit on me. Junked it and gave the Surface Pro away; my wife had taken over the iPad some months ago. In December, bought the Surface Pro 3, migrated everything over and it works great. Having only one computer, with everything on it, is a huge plus. I also am OK with the touch screen.

Would not buy a Surface tablet that was lesser screen or functionality than the Surface Pro 3, because, so far anyway, the Surface Pro 3 has everything I need in a laptop with a lesser form factor.

I have a Pluggable USB 3.0 hub (looked at the MS surface docking station, but did not like it) with a mouse, keyboard and good size monitor. So when I am doing real work stuff, there is the ability to use "traditional" interface plus the touch screen.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Jim

I might be looking at something like a Surface Pro. My current (and now very old PC) is a compac TC1000, a convertible slate. But using something like that in the feild really didn't seem to be that useful and I ended up resortimg to the tried and true clipboard, paper and pen. It was great for showing my portfolio and I think the gee whiz factor won over some clients, but that was in 2002. Now a very inexpensive tablet or smartphone can do all that, however the gee whiz factor of that ilk of tech is gone.

[Scott Hackler]

Im a tech junkie and the last laptop I bought was a Windows 8 (hate it) touchscreen laptop. The touchscreen is absolutely worthless to me 99% of the time. If fact I use it so infrequently that I forget it is a touchscreen! I would only want touchscreen again if I was buying a detachable screen (convert to tablet) of a Surface type pc.

It is weird how little the touch screen on the laptop gets used because I tote around a Samsung Note 4 phone (huge smart phone for those who dont know) and use the touch screen constantly.

[Wade Lippman]

I guess I am unique. I have a 14" with W8.1 and love it. You need the keyboard for typing and occasionally something is too tight to hit with your finger and you need the pointer, but for the most part I use the touchscreen.

I used to have a 10" tablet and hated it because typing was so clumsy.

[Judson Green]

Holy cow! Sure aren't giving away those surface pro's are they. 800 beans for the entry level! Nope too much for this guy. I'm trying to be sub 500.

[Lee Reep]

I'm old enough to remember the first generation Palm Pilot,
and the day I dropped it out of my shirt pocket into the toilet bowl.

Been there too. I had an HP 200LX Palmtop. Set it on top of the TP dispenser in a stall at work. It somehow got swept into the toilet as I turned around to hang up a coat. (Clean toilet, thankfully!) A plunging in and out of some alcohol, and a subsequent drying out, and then a bunch of sanitary wipes, and I almost got to the point that I could use it without getting a bit queasy ...

Now, regarding laptops, I tried my daughter's Win8 laptop. She needed a new laptop for her business, and didn't know she would struggle so much adapting to it. I had a really hard time figuring it out when I tried it. I like my iPhone, but it is a phone, and not a design tool or writing tool. A touchscreen serves a useful purpose on one. My wife has an iPad and we both use it alot. It is great for browsing the internet, handling some simple email, and such, but I sure would not want to write a long document on it.

Typing and using CAD to me are best suited to traditional laptops/desktops, using standard mouse/trackpad and possibly a special pointing/navigating device like a 3D Connexion SpaceNavigator. I'll either look for a Win7 machine the next time around (and maybe it needs to be soon), or maybe make the jump to a Mac.

[Brian Elfert]

An application that can be run 100% from the touch screen with little or no typing is a great application for a touch screen. I have seen some pretty good applications written for service people that are a lot better than pen and paper.

[William Adams]

Touch allows access to pinch and grow gestures which can be nice. I agree it makes more sense on a two in one device, though I prefer having a machine w/a stylus which allows easy sketching on the go (trying to get back into the drawing habit), handwriting input and markup/annotation of documents.