Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
LOL! You just described a laptop/Macbook. 
IMO, or I should say in my experience (IME), touchscreen tablets and smartphones are very good for BROWSING information, but they are lousy for WRITING information. I love my tablets and iPhone for looking up things, for reading books, magazines, articles, websites, et cetera, but hate them for entering anything the requires a keypad. On screen keypads are awkward to use and give no tactile response. For those of us old enough to have used desktop and laptop computers for 25+ years, having to use an on screen keypad that is in the same geometrical plane as the screen and takes up half of the screen's real estate, well it isn't natural to us at all. It is awkward, inconvenient, and downright physically uncomfortable to do. As a result, I personally find that entering text and numbers via an on screen keypad takes me several times as long as it would on a desktop or laptop computer style of keyboard. As a result, if I need to add a lot of text/numbers, and I'm using a tablet or smartphone, I'm going to connect an external keyboard. And even then it still sucks because you have to continuously move your hand from external keyboard to tablet/smartphone screen. Bottom line for me is this, for heavy duty text/number entry I'm turning off the tablet/smartphone and using my laptop. Why? because computers were designed and refined over decades to be data entry friendly, and they are much more so than a tablet/smartphone.
So IME tablets/smartphones are great and often preferred for data and information retrieval and browsing, but they suck at data entry. Even a tablet/smartphone with externally connected keyboard and mouse suck at data entry. A desktop/laptop will result in many times more data entry being accomplished than on a tablet/smartphone. So a 13" iPad with keyboard is totally uninteresting to me. I prefer my little iPad mini Retina and a laptop. |
This really does seem to be the direction that Apple is going in. The new versions of the OS for both the mac and iOS are all about easily passing data between the iOS device and the laptop/desktop device on the fly. It's actually pretty cool. An example would be working on a document on my laptop, then passing it to my iPad and carry my iPad to a meeting with the document. You, of course, can already do this, but the new OS makes it easy and seamless. It's very, very slick.