Laptops refuse to lie down and die!
By Anand Parthasarathy
I must start with a confession: I hate virtual on-screen keyboards that come with tablets and mobile phones. I want the tactile feel of a real, physical keyboard for all serious writing, beyond the limited characters of an SMS message or a tweet.
Blame this on my age — which takes me back to the era of heavy manual typewriters. I spoiled many keyboards in the early years of PCs, by bashing them as I was used to do with my Remington typewriter. I somehow learned to soften my touch for computer keyboards — but the transition to virtual keyboards on the sensitive touch screens of phones and tablets? No, I never made it with any success. On phones, I seem to always hit two keys at the same time.
Which is why I am delighted that the obituaries that so-called experts have been writing for the laptop PC have all proved to be premature. Laptops, Notebooks, call them what you will. They just won’t die — even after the onslaught of tablets and phablets (When a phone is 6 inches or more in screen size, they tend to call it a phablet).
The initial euphoria about tablets seems to have sobered. Yes they are great portable devices, but you can’t do all the things you can, with a standard Windows or Apple laptop.
But a standard laptop is difficult to carry. Have you seen those execs in airports, their shoulders bent under the weight of their company laptops? This sight is becoming rarer as laptops become thinner and lighter. Intel introduced a form factor called Ultra book which was extremely portable. It was also extremely unaffordable by most of us.
So I was thrilled to be recently trying out an Indian laptop that was at once, light in weight and light on my purse, while still offering me a full sized standard keyboard and a 14.1 inch 720 p HD screen.
It’s called ThinBook and comes from Hyderabad-based RDP Workstations and though it uses a big 10,000 mAh battery that works for 6–8 hours on full charge, the weight is a manageable 1.45 kg. It runs on a 1.84GHz Intel Atom x5-Z8300 processor with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of on board solid state storage. You can expand this with 128 GB of additional Flash memory by plugging in a microSD card. But even will seem small storage to traditional laptop users. Well, get used to it! This is the era of cloud computing, so PC makers expect you to store most of your files and all of your tools on the Web, using your onboard storage for the bare essentials like Operating System — in this case, Windows 10 — some antivirus tools and your choice of browsers.
If you want to use new-age laptops like the ThinBook, which have also dispensed with the DVD drive, be prepared to store your files in a free Cloud store like Google Drive or Windows OneDrive or DropBox. You may also have to subscribe to Microsoft’s online avatar of its Office Suite — Office 360, since the full version will never fit in your machine. I am a regular user of Photoshop but if I am to use the ThinBook, I have to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud — a costly proposition — or make do with a free tool like the web-based Photoshop Express.
External connection-wise the ThinBook is OK — USB 2 and USB 3; Audio out, MicroHDMI — as well as WiFi and Bluetooth, though I thought the VGA camera was a bit underpowered for today’s taste.
For Rs 9,999 this is as good as it gets.
IndiaTechOnline
Originally published on The Golden Sparrow
