We’re all used to using touchscreens daily on our smartphones or tablets. However, the line between laptops and tablets is becoming increasingly blurred, with lots of excellent 2-in-1 products available. There has also been a big increase in laptops with touchscreen capability in the last few years too. The question is, do you need it?
Laptops were fine without touchscreens for years and we all know how to operate them quickly and easily with a simple mouse and keyboard system. Is adding a touchscreen just a gimmick to make you pay more or does it improve functionality and ease of use? This article will run through some of the benefits of using a touchscreen laptop, to help you decide if it’s right for you.
Easy Note Taking
If you are a student or you regularly have to attend meetings and take notes at work, a touchscreen is great. Typing isn’t always as fast as writing by hand, and having a good touchscreen laptop with a stylus gives you the best of both worlds; you can write by hand and save a digital copy for editing and updating later on. It’s also excellent for annotating things, so you can bring up a document on your laptop and then use the touchscreen to add notes around it. For some people, note-taking isn’t that useful and it’s not worth investing in a touchscreen for this reason. However, if you take a lot of notes, you should consider it.
Simple Photo Editing
Photo editing software has been updated to incorporate a lot of great touchscreen features. Things like Photoshop are so intuitive and easy to use with a touchscreen, so if you’re a photographer or designer, you’ll find it much simpler to work with a touchscreen rather than a mouse. Just bear in mind that you need a fairly powerful touchscreen laptop, like a Chromebook Laptop, to run this kind of software. There are a lot of touchscreen laptops that are closer to a tablet with a keyboard rather than a proper laptop, and these may struggle with advanced applications.
Digital Drawing Applications
Digital art is taking off right now and many people are experimenting with drawing on their computers, rather than with paper or canvas. Digital drawing applications give you so much more flexibility in terms of what you can do and the effects that you can add once you have finished drawing. However, the obvious downside is that drawing with a mouse is not very precise and it doesn’t come close to using a pencil. That’s where touchscreen laptops come in. They are the only viable option if you are serious about creating digital art on your laptop.
If you are using it for drawing, you’ll need a relatively powerful laptop that can run the most recent drawing applications. However, the most important thing to look out for is the stylus. Make sure you choose a laptop that supports a digital pen, like the Surface Pro or the Lenovo IdeaPad.
Touchscreen laptops aren’t for everybody and if you mainly use your computer for word processing or scrolling social media, there’s no need to pay the extra for a touchscreen. However, if you use it for the specific applications mentioned above, it’s worth it.
