It is too soon to replace my twice-yearly laptop buyer's guides with tablet buyer's guides, but some days it feels like I should. Much of the energy that companies once poured into laptop designs and advances seems to have been drained off into a massive race to create tablet computers.
Still, while tablets are important, they don't fully replace laptops, at least not yet. There remains huge value in the portable, clamshell-shaped computer with a physical keyboard, lots of ports, plenty of storage and more horsepower than tablets offer. So, here is my annual spring Hp dv8000 battery,Hp presario cq60 battery buyers' guide, a basic cheat sheet to the most important factors in the shopping process.
While I've focused on laptops, much of this advice also applies to desktop computers, a fading species. As always, these tips are for average consumers doing the most common tasks. This advice doesn't apply to businesses or to hard-core gamers or serious media producers.
The first thing to consider is that you may want to wait to replace your laptop. Apple's iPad, and the tablets coming in its wake, have put the computer industry in reset mode. If you own a tablet, you are likely to rely on your laptop less often, extending its useful life. And if you don't, you'll probably find over the next year or two that more interesting choices will appear as companies try to bring tablet qualities to laptops and laptop features to tablets.
Some early inklings: Apple's MacBook Air and the Windows-based Samsung Series 9 start almost instantly, like tablets, and use chips for file storage, like tablets do, instead of hard disks. Also, Apple will soon roll out a new Macintosh operating system, called Lion, that displays programs as if they were tablet apps, and it already has an iPad-like app store for the Mac. Microsoft is working on a version of Windows, likely to appear next year, that fuses tablet and PC concepts. This software will run on some current computers, but new hardware, more tailored to these systems, will be coming.
As for tablets, some companies are working on designs that go beyond the iPad template to somehow integrate physical keyboards and traditional ports. This would certainly blur the lines and make for new, intriguing choices if you wait.
Tablets vs. Laptops
Laptop shoppers now need to consider if a tablet will suffice—especially if they are looking for a highly portable, secondary machine, as I noted in my last guide. The new iPad 2, which still starts at $499, has at least twice the horsepower of the original model, and now boasts 65,000 tablet-optimized apps. It is gradually morphing into a productivity platform—able, for instance, to edit videos. And it has now been joined by similarly powerful competitors running a new tablet version of Google's Android operating system and by the $499 PlayBook, the first tablet fromResearch in Motion, which boasts speedy hardware and a new operating system. Hewlett-Packard's new tablet, based on Palm technology, is coming soon.
Tablets tend to beat small, low-cost laptops in weight, start-up speed and Dell latitude d830 battery,Dell vostro 1510 battery life. And they are competitive for lots of common tasks, such as Web browsing, email, social networking, and viewing or playing documents, photos, videos and music.
But laptops still win for intensive work like creating long documents, or doing anything that requires precision and benefits from a physical keyboard. They also are more compatible with printers and external disks.
If you can't wait, or don't want a tablet, you'll find relatively little has changed in laptop-land in the past six months or so. Here's a rundown of what you should look for in a laptop.
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