I Really Like My Laptop’s Touchscreen
When Windows 8 came out, touchscreen laptops became incredibly common, much to the annoyance of most tech nerds. At the end of the day, they seem like an unnecessary accessory: why touch the screen when you have a trackpad? But I took a tactile step and gradually fell in love with my touchscreen.
Touch screens are intuitive
Give any toddler a device with a screen and they’ll probably slide their finger across it; they were born in the world of iPad and other devices for which tactile interaction is the norm. It’s just … intuitive. The screen is there, the icons are right there, why don’t you reach out and touch them?
Yes, we can say that they learned that behavior by watching us, but I would go so far as to say that we un- learned it. When faced with an old cathode-ray tube, a toddler is likely to fondle that screen as well, regardless of when it has previously touched sensory devices. It just makes sense to reach out and see what happens. My point is that manipulating elements on the screen by touching them is just intuitive and until now has not been common simply due to technological limitations.
So how does this affect my daily driver laptop?
Why is touching easier than clicking
Although my laptop is one that can be used in tablet mode, I rarely use it. I just use it like a regular laptop with a keyboard. And yet I touch the screen all the time. To simply scroll web pages or close or move windows, there are many small gestures that I don’t even think about until I come across a traditional display – where I foolishly reach for the screen and stop before smearing the passive glass.
It’s a simple pleasure that I can precisely manipulate images and maps by flicking my finger to zoom. Does this change my way of working? Not really, to be honest, but it’s a minor barrier that removes the way I interact with the computer. More complex gestures with two or three fingers need to be learned, but manipulating an image in digital space by swiping and touching it doesn’t take any real thought at all. And this gives you very high accuracy.
However, the most common way I use it is pretty mundane: scrolling through articles by nudging text up, just like you do on your phone. Again, it doesn’t change life, but it just works, and I was surprised how quickly it became second nature to me without trying.
But you have to pay for it
Unfortunately, there is a downside. The biggest drawback of touchscreen displays is their impact on battery life . One study found that battery performance was 24% lower than a laptop of the same model without a touchscreen. Understandably, this violates the terms of the deal for a lot of people. Touchscreens also tend to be more expensive than traditional displays.
And another question about user interface design. Despite the sane catalog of Modern or Metro apps in Windows, most software isn’t designed for touchscreens. Windows 10’s tablet mode also offers a few improvements over 8, but I still wouldn’t rely on touch-oriented software alone. The intricate and tiny controls in something like Adobe Photoshop aren’t optimized for my clumsy fingers, and I wouldn’t use a touchscreen for that purpose.
And that’s cool. I do not use the touchscreen as my primary control for my computer. It’s just another tool for the way I work and browse the web. It’s not for everyone , but I’m happy about a small part of Jetson’s life.