Saturday, November 13, 2010

Coping with 'Tablets' as PC's become obsolete in homes

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Since 'Vista' the PC needed a huge amount of resources to cope with the up and coming games and the new media centres. Looking at the latest game 'Black Ops' sales, it becomes obvious that virtually all sales were for 'Playstation' or 'XBox'. The PC has no motion controllers so the future looks bleak for games. The Media centres were also a flop as 'Freeview' and 'Tivo' type devices were much cheaper and more reliable. The large hard drives for storing movies and music have shifted out of the PC and put on as 'Portable Extended Drives' plugging into the USB port. Modern office suites such as 'Oracle Office', 'Ashampoo Office and Libre Office run quite happily in 256Mb RAM on a Pentium 3. Home drawing programs such as 'Inkscape' are a good choice for Labels and Greeting cards. The PC has now become an unreliable resource hungry machine that struggles to keep itself running without third party help. This is where the Tablet comes into its own. The biggest choice to make is whether to use a 7" or 10" screen. If you can read a paperback book then a 7" screen will suffice as these are much clearer to read than the printed word and easier to hold. The 10" screen is slightly larger than a hard covered book. The virtual screen keyboard can use 'Swyping' rather than 'typing' to make it quicker. Using voice control to type is annoying for anyone else in the room. 'Apple' and 'Android' are the only options at the moment but by the end of the year there will be many major players coming to the market. The tablet consists of a touch screen display, a basic computer with a small amount or RAM, a small solid state flash drive and a battery. Communication is achieved by ethernet, wireless or bluetooth. External memory by USB or card reader. Printing achieved by using email or network printers.