Tablets and mobiles are being used more and more for general day-to-day computing. The are getting better, faster and more capable than ever before, but is it possible to do without your computer totally? The answer really depends on what you’re using your machine for and for how long at a time.
If we look just at physical size first, there is a significant difference between a smart phone at 4” to 7”, tablets at 7” to 10”, laptops starting at 12” and 14” going up to 17” and then big desktop monitors ranging from 17” up to giant 21” or 24” or bigger. The smaller a screen, the more uncomfortable it is to use for long periods.
A good size desktop screen of 21” or 24” will be comfortable to use for 8+ hours work, so a full work day. You can position your keyboard and mouse in a comfortable place. A standard laptop of 15.6” is comfortable to use for about 3 to 4 hours, and small travel laptops of 12” or 14” will be less again, probably around 2.5 hours. Typing for a long time on a tablet computer will start to hurt after about 60 minutes and on a smart phone even less, perhaps 15 minutes. So if you’re planning on writing a letter, perhaps taking around 90 minutes, you probably wouldn’t want to do this regularly on a tablet computer or phone.
Tablets and phones are perfectly capable of sending and receiving email and browsing most websites. Since the end of 2016 more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobiles and tablets, so it’s more important than ever to ensure websites are mobile friendly. However there are still plenty of sites out there that do not work well on a Tablet or Phone, often these are government or public services. Many of the big firms have got mobile friendly websites and apps, but some more niche tasks in many of these apps cannot be done from mobile devices and require you to login via a computer.
Another stumbling block in moving solely to a tablet is storage space, they don’t have big internal storage so it’s difficult to store big photo collections or lots of music or movies. You’re then faced with having external storage. Tablets don’t work well if you like a Mouse pointer, physical keyboard, DVD or bluray disks, Multiple screens, etc.
But Tablets and Phones ARE very portable and nice to use for the functions they were designed for. In summary: If you just do a few emails a day and a little bit of online shopping and research, then a tablet will probably do you fine. But if you store large libraries of photos, music, videos, etc, or use bespoke or specialist software, or like advanced printing functions, or use your machine for several hours at a time, then you’re probably not ready to get rid of your “proper” computer.
Many thanks to JC for suggesting this month’s topic. I have long-standing debate with JC that life without a real computer simply isn’t possible; he is working hard to prove me wrong.
Also here is another reminder that if you’ve not arranged an upgrade or replacement for your windows 7 computer then now is the time to act. We’re happy to give your computer a free upgrade appraisal, just email with the make and model of your computer.