Prakash Per­sad

The re­lent­less march of com­put­ing tech­nol­o­gy can lead to con­fu­sion as to what de­vice we re­al­ly need, as op­posed to de­sire. Desk­tops are rarely men­tioned these days as lap­tops, net­books and tablets, all portable com­put­ers, seem to dom­i­nate the mar­kets now.One will have to al­so fig­ure out the role of ph­ablets and the emerg­ing phone watch­es in the scheme of things and pref­er­ence for IOS, or An­droid or Win­dows etc.

To make an in­formed choice, many fac­tors need be con­sid­ered. These in­clude whether the de­vice is in­tend­ed for ed­u­ca­tion or work. In the case of ed­u­ca­tion, the lev­el is crit­i­cal. The re­quire­ments of sec­ondary school stu­dents, for ex­am­ple, would be quite dif­fer­ent from those at uni­ver­si­ty. For the work­ing folks, the field of work would gen­er­al­ly im­pact heav­i­ly on the de­ci­sion. An­oth­er fac­tor would be whether the de­vice is in­tend­ed for use as a stand­alone or as a com­pan­ion.

Weight and size are ba­sic con­sid­er­a­tions. Tablets have the def­i­nite edge as they weigh a lot less than lap­tops. That for the tablet is nor­mal­ly in the one-pound re­gion while lap­tops are in the three to nine-pound range, with the light­weight ones be­ing at the low­er end of the scale. If one trav­els a lot then lap­tops can be quite tax­ing on the back and shoul­ders. Nor­mal­ly, tablet screens range from sev­en inch­es to ten inch­es and lap­tops from 11 inch­es up­wards. So for ap­pli­ca­tions that re­quire larg­er de­tailed im­ages, lap­tops will have the edge.

For sec­ondary and pri­ma­ry school chil­dren, tablets may prove to be ad­van­ta­geous. They are lighter and many e-texts books can be loaded on thus re­duc­ing the need for a book bag weight­ed with many heavy texts. Re­cent­ly, it was an­nounced that stu­dents en­ter­ing sec­ondary school might be get­ting tablets in­stead of lap­tops.

That would be a step in the right di­rec­tion for the ex­ist­ing pro­gres­sive and laud­able lap­top dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­gramme. If this ini­tia­tive is im­ple­ment­ed, it should be ac­com­pa­nied by an e-books dis­tri­b­u­tion and de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme. This would re­quire that all schools be wire­less en­abled, which would serve to pro­vide the ba­sis for a com­pre­hen­sive digi­ti­sa­tion of the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

At the uni­ver­si­ty lev­el, one may an­tic­i­pate the favour­ing of tablets over lap­tops in the arts and hu­man­i­ties. In sci­ence and en­gi­neer­ing how­ev­er, where spe­cialised soft­ware would be re­quired by stu­dents, lap­tops may hold the edge. The is­sue of pop­u­lar­i­ty and util­i­ty of the Mi­crosoft Of­fice Suite will al­so play a sig­nif­i­cant role. The su­pe­ri­or­i­ty of lap­tops over tablets in de­vel­op­ing, for­mat­ting and edit­ing, both com­plex and not so com­plex, as­sign­ments, re­ports and the­ses is self-ev­i­dent.

Be­ing re­spon­sive in the con­nect­ed world is crit­i­cal and thus the tablet, due to its size, may pos­sess a dis­tinc­tive ad­van­tage. This must how­ev­er be weighed against the ph­ablets which can be car­ried in one's pock­et and fa­cil­i­tates the quick re­sponse to both e-mail and texts. It should be not­ed that tex­ting ser­vices like What­sApp are quite pop­u­lar and seems to be re­plac­ing e-mails as the pre­ferred choice for fast and ef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

In many cas­es, tablets may serve as a com­pan­ion de­vice as op­posed to a stand­alone de­vice, par­tic­u­lar­ly if there is soft­ware com­pat­i­bil­i­ty which al­lows one to work on re­ports and files on ei­ther the lap­top or the tablet. An ex­am­ple of this would be the HP tablet PC which us­es the Win­dows op­er­at­ing sys­tem and Of­fice.

Of course, if the in­tent is to surf the Web and for pur­pos­es of en­ter­tain­ment, shop­ping, be­ing up­dates and play­ing sim­pler games, then the tablet is all that is need­ed.There is a trend of con­ver­gence be­tween tablets and lap­tops. Un­til such a time, the tablet will be for many, a com­pan­ion de­vice and is un­like­ly to re­place need for a lap­top.