Touch Screen Laptop: Pros and Cons

Not long ago before Apple revealed its latest Apple laptop line we heard many rumors about MacBook Pro’s with multitouch-enabled displays, now while this sounds great to have an iPhone display on a laptop. It never happened.

The displays would have cost a lot more and as such so would the Apple Macbooks, although many users would have paid the increased price as an option.

If you want to buy a touch screen laptop you have a few choices today but you should be aware of the pros and cons of this type of display. First up you will get fingerprints so you should always be prepared to keep your display clean on a daily basis if possible.

Most importantly you should expect to pay more money than you would with a standard laptop and while you could have two computers the same apart from the screen being touchscreen, the price will be very different. You can save money by getting a gadget that will make your laptop’s screen a touchscreen, but then this is never as good as the real thing.

If we forget about the price for a moment, then the pros far outweigh the cons when it comes to touchscreen displays.

With a touch screen laptop, you can take notes in your own handwriting or sketch with a stylus. With good handwriting recognition software you can translate both printed and cursive writing into digitized form. Laptops are built to be portable and instead of using a touchpad or mouse, you can use a stylus or your finger to open files, drag & drop, paste and copy, move or resize windows and a lot more.

There are many touchscreen laptops on the way, this includes models like the Hewlett Packard multi-touch Touchsmart tx2, CTL’s 2go Convertible Classmate PC (one of the first touch-enabled netbooks), Dell are adding touch-screen capabilities to certain laptops in 2009, and the Eee PC Touch sports a nearly 9-inch touch screen. This is a small taste of whats to come.

What do you see as pros and cons for touch screen laptops and will you be getting one in 2009/2010?

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