Win8 touch screen laptop

Computer shop news:

According to foreign media reports, after the advent of the Windows8 system, the touch screen is more useful than before. However, some authorities in the technology industry have long believed that touch screens are not suitable for laptops. They sometimes quote a sentence that Jobs said in 2010: “The surface of the touch does not want to be placed vertically. & rdquo; Jobs was explaining to the world why Apple's laptops did not use touch screen technology.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this year: "You can integrate the oven and the refrigerator, but that kind of thing may not get users." Love. & rdquo;

This is the view of the leaders of the world's most profitable technology companies. I personally believe in them, but I don't know why, I still keep clicking on the screen of my MacBook Air this month.

Windows 8 Laptop

I have reviewed various laptops for TheVerge, and recently I tested a series of touch-screen notebooks based on Windows 8. I have prepared for disappointment from the beginning. I have prepared a set of rhetoric. For example, although Windows 8 gesture control technology can easily operate the computer with the touch screen, the overall concept is not very good, such as the Windows 8 interface. Many unnecessary touch-screen controls have been imposed on users, and users will definitely not like that, especially if some features are already well done on traditional laptops.

But as I became more aware of the system as I used Windows 8, I became more and more convinced that the touch screen was the future direction of the notebook, even if its touch screen was placed vertically.

When Steve Jobs publicly opposed touch-screen laptops in 2010, he relied on the common sense of decades of user experience research on "gorilla arm syndrome". Simply put, if you You can feel particularly uncomfortable by extending your arm in front of the touch screen and holding it for a while. However, there are a lot of assumptions here. If you are not stretching your arms in the air, are you ready to touch something, but stay on the keyboard in a very comfortable posture?

Our views on this issue have always been wrong. The touch screen is not a replacement for a keyboard or mouse, but a supplement. If I want to type something on my laptop and I have enough room to stretch my arm, I still choose to type it through the keyboard. But if I was in a crowded car, on a plane, or in a queue, and all I had to do was reply to an email with a short sentence, then use Windows 8 based The touch screen laptop will do the job very easily.

But maybe that's just an extreme example. During daily use, I found that regardless of whether the device I was using had a touch screen function, I couldn't help but click on the screen because I wanted to do something faster and more intuitively.

If you want to start a program on your desktop computer, which operation method will be more effective? Is it easier to lean down on a special glass surface, gently slide it with your finger, and then click on the icon? Still finding a visual icon and clicking on it is easier? When you want to close a program, is it easier to point the mouse pointer at the tiny "X" symbol in the upper right corner of the dialog and click on it? Or is it easier to use the ALT+F4 shortcut? Or is it easier to scan the program directly on the Win8 page?

Of course, these operations are especially meaningful for Windows systems because the touchpad experience under Windows is always bad. We tested some relatively good touchpads this year, but in general, there are still many loopholes in those touchpads, and there are often unresponsive situations. In contrast, the touch screen on these Windows 8 laptops is like a refreshing breeze. They perform poorly because I want to really try the touch screen, but even if they don't perform as badly, I think I'm still willing to choose a direct control over the screen. After all, my MacBook Air's touchpad is very common, and I always keep reminding myself not to touch the launch bar on the screen.

Unfortunately, the ability of Windows 8 to perform well on touch screens has a lot to do with the specifications of the display. The larger the display, the lower the resolution, the easier it is to operate with your finger on the touch screen, because in that case the icon will be relatively larger.

The problem is that the low resolution of the touch screen makes the icon look great. Windows 8 doesn't seem to be optimized for small 1080p screens, and even if you lower the resolution or DPI, you can get a bigger touch target, and most of the Windows 8 icons don't get much bigger. In IE, you can zoom in on the target quickly by clicking the zoom function, but Microsoft does not provide similar shortcut zooming on Windows 8 systems.

Instead, Apple has developed a solution for this problem and started applying it from the iPhone 4. The Retina display has a pixel density four times that of a normal display, which makes the image look sharper and sharper, but the touch target is as large as before. The iPad 2 has exactly the same user interface as the third generation or iPad4, but the images displayed on the display of the new generation are sharper and sharper. Although Apple's 15-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pro are equipped with a Retina display that is not a touch screen, it uses the same 4x pixel density technology.

Apple has not developed the world's first MP3 player, the first touchscreen smartphone, the first graphical user interface, the first tablet or the first laptop SSD. It likes to wait for a technology to mature, but the industry doesn't quite understand how to use it properly. A similar situation may arise with the use of a touch screen for a laptop. Perhaps, Microsoft has verified that this idea is feasible, but Apple now has another opportunity to grab the market, which is to perfect the user interface and promote it.

The outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that when the Windows 8 system is a semi-finished product, I believe that he means: Microsoft must have seen the direction of the user interface, but failed to Optimize its user interface for next-generation touch screens. If the news we hear now is true, Microsoft still has the opportunity to correct the error, and it is faster than you think. Microsoft is preparing to upgrade the system every year after the launch of Windows Blue. If Microsoft can solve the problem of user interface scaling adjustment, find a replacement for Retina display or other convenient way to use touch screen technology, Windows can keep it on the touch screen. The leading position in the field. If Microsoft can seize this opportunity, it can avoid being surpassed by Apple in 2013.