Sunday, December 9, 2012

Touch Screen Laptops

In my local Best Buy I was curious to see what, if any, touch-enabled Windows 8 machines they had for potential customers to try out. I had looked on-line and I thought that I had seen a couple of laptops and possibly an Asus Convertible tablet (although I did not see this on display) I knew that there were no Microsoft Surfaces to be seen other than what MS have in their stores (none located in this particular country), so I was pleased to see a Lenovo laptop with a touch screen. There was another laptop, I can't recall the make but it could have been a Samsung.

Both of these Windows 8 laptops had the same problems with Windows 8. This was the inability to bring up the "Home" screen or the "gadget" menu on the right of the screen using a finger on the display. As these were both laptops that had keyboards and pointing devices, track pads, the menu and navigation was possible by reverting to that method but THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A TOUCH DEVICE! This leaves me to wonder how Windows 8 would perform on a purely touch device such as the Surface.

I am going to be in New York next week so I may get a chance to play around with a Surface. I am also curious to see how the sales staff approach my evaluation of the device. From what I have heard there is a large measure of "hard sell" and potential customers do not get much of a chance to actually use the Surface for themselves and had it "demonstrated" to them. I realize that to most new users of Windows 8 they will not be aware of how you are supposed to navigate the new GUI, but I do and it seems to be lacking. At least on the hardware that I have had a chance to try it on. Previously I had played around with Windows 8 on a non-touch device and that is somewhat missing the point and I can't say that I was at all impressed.

Another point was that all the Windows 8 machines that I have tried have not been connected to the Internet. This is presumably due to the, still, threat of infection that Windows presents if this was allowed (all Apple devices in Best Buy are connected to the Internet). I would like to see how I.E.10 performs, but I can't do this if the machine is not Internet enabled. My first impressions of IE10 is that it has a "clunky" interface as compared to IE9, but I can't really tell.

No comments: