Touchscreen laptops are going to be great
Posted: 13th Jun 2012
The last couple of weeks has seen a flurry of laptop news.
First there was Computex, the huge trade show in Taiwan where manufacturers started to reveal the notebooks that will be running Windows 8. Then there was Apple’s WWDC, at which Apple showed off the new MacBook Pro – as thin as a MacBook Air but with a high resolution ‘retina’ screen.
The most interesting new technology, though, is touch screens. We’ve seen the likes of Lenovo’s Yoga shown off before, and were suitably impressed. This looks like a standard Windows desktop in normal mode but the screen can be folded around behind the keyboard and used like a tablet for Windows 8′s touchscreen fun.
Even more intriguing, though, is the ASUS Transformer Book, announced last week.
This works just like the company’s current Transformer tablets, in that all the processing is done behind the touch sensitive screen, which can be fully removed from the keyboard dock to work as a separate tablet. Other than a keyboard, the dock also houses a big battery for well over ten hours between charges and USB hub with an SD card reader built in. It’s also bigger than the current Transformer, with a 14inch screen, and runs Windows 8.
Laptops with touch sensitive screens are great. They’re the best of both worlds, and mean you don’t need a separate tablet for when you just want to read something or play a simple game.
The bad news, though, is that a lot of these really interesting laptops aren’t here yet — and won’t be launched until Windows 8 is, later this year. In the meantime, as tablets and laptops start to converge, a company called ClamCase has just announced a device that could render them all irrelevant.
The ClamBook is a notebook without a computer in it — you simply plug your phone into the side and see your Android or iPhone screen writ large on its big display. Given how powerful phones are and efficient at processing things like office documents, this could be an even more cost effective way to get the best of both worlds when it arrives around Christmas time.
