laptop with touchscreen - just an option?

[Tsang Fai]

Surface Pro has touchscreen & pen.
How many people would appreciate these features when considering a laptop?
i am a surface pro fan. but i wonder what percentage of users would care the touchscreen? many of my friends say they are satisfied already with mouse & keyboard.
the fact is, when people think of laptop, their mindset is keyboard and trackpad. these
people include the mac lovers and also the general PC users.

 

[Laura Knotek]

I got a new ASUS laptop last fall, and I chose one that has a touchscreen. I don't use the touchscreen often, but it's nice to have the feature available.

 

[Coreldan]

I think touch screened laptops are the kind of things that you don't learn to appreciate until you give one a chance. My dad has some 400€ HP TouchSmart and while it's no premium device, it's great to have the touch screen on it too. You still use just mouse and keyboard for many things, but there are things that are handy on the touch screen. Once you use a laptop with a touch screen for a while, you find yourself poking normal laptops all the time

I think a premium laptop without a touch screen is a rip off.

 

[Tsang Fai]

I think touch screened laptops are the kind of things that you don't learn to appreciate until you give one a chance. My dad has some 400€ HP TouchSmart and while it's no premium device, it's great to have the touch screen on it too. You still use just mouse and keyboard for many things, but there are things that are handy on the touch screen. Once you use a laptop with a touch screen for a while, you find yourself poking normal laptops all the time

I think a premium laptop without a touch screen is a rip off.

Exactly. Once you get familiar with a touch+mouse+keyboard environment, you would find a laptop without touchscreen inconvenient. I make good use of touch-screen on task-bars, scrolling, resizing. Sometimes, navigating a webpage with touchscreen is just super-fast. In excel, pointing to any cell with my finger is just cool.

Agree exactly to what you said - "don't learn to appreciate until you give one a chance". I am sure people would love SP3 when they have a chance to try it. Microsoft has done a great job in making this beautiful device. But it really need time for the general laptop users to get exposed to a "laptop with touchscreen (or even pen)". As we can observe, most users are "satisfied" with their traditional laptop. Even for users considering a new laptop, most are reluctant to try Win8 laptop with touchscreen (some even try to avoid Win8 laptop and ask for a non-touchscreen laptop and then re-install Win7). This is quite ridiculous in the sense that they have get familiar with the touchscreen of smartphone/tablet for quite a long time!

I believe the Surface Pro is not just for the professional users. It is so beautiful and handy that the general laptop users would love it. Maybe Microsoft could consider a Surface Pro with even more basic config? (e.g. an ordinary touch-screen without support for pen) Indeed many users only use Office, browse the web, watch movies, that's it. I still question why they made the Surface RT which doesn't support desktop application. I don't believe it is technically incapable of running desktop applications - remember most basic users just use basis, non-cpu demanding software. If there is such an entry-level Surface device, it must attract a huge group of users to give Surface a try. I don't think users would complain it is not fast enough to run software like Photoshop, given the price they have paid for.

Laptop with touchscreen would be a trend and eventually be a standard. Microsoft is in exactly the right direction. But how can they make this happen sooner?

 

[hopmedic]

I have had a touchscreen laptop for four years. First, in 2010 I picked up an HP dv6t-SE with a touchscreen, and later the SP2 and now SP3. The HP wasn't nearly as useful running Windows 7 as it was once I started running Win8. I started with Win8 when it was still a developer preview, and once I added that to it, using the laptop was a whole different ball game. Also, after that, I started coming to work and trying to touch the screens on my computer at work, which didn't work. :wink:

Even before having a touchscreen at home, I had touch screen monitors (not on laptop) at my former job, and now and then I would touch the screen at home to no avail. At that job, I put touchscreen monitors out in the factory for production employees to use on the assembly line, so I had one at my desk for testing purposes, as well, so really, I've been using touchscreen monitors for about 8 years.

Having a touchscreen on the computer is just natural when you're close to the screen. Often it is easier just to reach up and tap on the screen than to use the touchpad to move the mouse and click. And if you're holding it in your lap, reading, flicking with the thumb to scroll is just natural.

At this point, having used touch for so long, there is no way I'll ever go back to a PC without it.

 

[strollin]

I mainly only use the touchscreen on my SP3 when I am in tablet mode (keyboard detached or folded back). When I am in laptop mode (keyboard attached and using a mouse) then I have no use for the touchscreen and rarely use it.

 

[anon(7901790)]

I use the touch screen in both tablet mode and laptop mode quite regularly. I find using the touch screen even in laptop mode is more efficient than using the track pad when it comes to positioning the cursor or clicking a button. What I find cumbersome is using the pen while in laptop mode. When in tablet mode, the pen feels much more natural, especially in OneNote.

In fact, I'm so conditioned now with using a touch screen, I automatically try to swipe the screen on the laptops I see on display in a store. My seven year old daughter is similarly conditioned now. When we visited the Microsoft store last week, she immediately walked up to a SP3 on display and swiped the screen.

So if I ever decided to go back to a standard laptop, would I want one with a touch screen? YES! Which I don't foresee me doing.