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Tablet Pcs : How It Is Different From A Desktop Or A Notebook-Battery, & Others

Battery Life

Tablets are design for efficiency because of the low power requirements of their hardware components. In fact, the battery takes up the majority of the interior of a tablet. In comparison, laptops use more powerful hardware. The battery component of the laptop is a far smaller percentage of the laptops internal components. Thus, even with the higher capacity battery of laptops, they do not run as long as a tablet. Many of the tablets right now can run up to ten hours of web usage before require a recharge. The average laptop would only run for roughly three to four hours with a few systems able to stretch it out to eight hours but that still less than a tablet. This means that tablets can achieve all day usage, which few laptops can achieve.

Storage Capacity

In order to keep their size and costs down, tablet PCs have had to rely on new solid-state storage memory as a means to store programs and data. While these have the potential for faster access and low power usage, they have one major disadvantage in the amount of files they can store. Most tablets come with configurations that allow between 16 and 64 gigabytes of storage. By comparison, most laptops still use traditional hard drives that hold far much more. Extremely affordable net books still have 160 gigabytes of storage, which allows for ten times the amount of data as the most affordable tablets. This won't always be the case though as some laptops have moved to solid state drives as well and may have as little as 64GB of space.

Software

The software that runs on a laptop or tablet can be vastly different in terms of capabilities. Now if the tablet PC is running Windows 7 such as the HP Slate or ASUS Eee Slate it can theoretically run the same software as a laptop but will likely be slower. This can make it easy to use it as a primary laptop using the same software used in a work environment. The two other major tablet platforms right now are Android and iOS. Both of these require applications specific to their operating systems. There are several programs available for each of these and many more are being developed. The problem is the lack of the input devices and hardware performance limitations mean that some more advanced features supplied by corresponding laptop class programs may have to be dropped in order to fit into the tablet environment.

Tablet as a Stand Alone Computer

This category is describing a situation where a tablet PC would be your only computer system. A laptop is a fully self contained system that one can use fully as a computer system in terms of loading data and programs onto and backing up. Many tablet PCs actually require an additional computer system beyond the tablet for backing up the device. Major disadvantages of tablets over notebook computer in using as a stand-alone computer are:

  • Screen size (tabs have usually 7" screen size compared to 14" or more for laptops)
  • Processing: tabs have much limited processing capacity, and you can't run applications that require heavy processing.
  • Absence of inbuilt keyboard

As it stands, laptops still offer a greater level of flexibility when it comes to mobile computing. They may not have the same level of portability, battery backup time or ease of use of a tablet but there are still a number of issues that tablets need to resolve before they become the main means of mobile computing. The issues as mentioned earlier, include processing power, storage space (also called hard disk capacity), memory capacity, screen size, etc. If you already have a desktop computer, then a tablet PC may be an option if you use it mainly for entertainment and web usage while traveling.

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