Smartphone vs. Laptop

[monsieurms]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

I keep looking for a way to reduce my devices, but I just can't. I still find a desktop invaluable. Doing complicated stuff on small screens is a drag. My 24" monitor and full size ergonomic keyboard is SO much more comfortable, not to mention all the peripherals hooked on. Desktop: irreplaceable.

Tablet: has very limited uses for me, but for what I do use it for, largely Zinio mags and Netflix vids, it is also invaluable and the right choice. (I'd rather read ebooks on my phone.)

The phone is always with me. It's the closest to a universal device. Next to my desktop, this is the one I couldn't live without. There was a time when I'd take my laptop everywhere just for internet access and email, but that time has passed. Even the full size tablet is overkill for that. My phone has eliminated a lot of laptop and tablet use. But the screen isn't big enough for complex stuff like writing long documents.

The laptop is the one I keep thinking I can get rid of as all its uses overlap with other things. Yet, if I go on a trip with just a tablet (Done that!), it sorta works, but it's annoying. The laptop does so much more and so much more easily and comfortably. Plus, if my desktop goes down, which happened last year, I can keep working seamlessly with the laptop. It's invaluable as a backup. For that reason alone, I can't quite get rid of it. I sure can't do my work on a tablet or a phone.

So, while I'm still hoping for more convergence, I can't quite get to the point of getting rid of anything. The closest to going, though, is my laptop. I don't have HUGE business uses for it. I could survive with a tablet, perhaps, if I bought a keyboard. (Of course, at that point, it's sort of a laptop!) But I'd be queasy without a computing backup for business reasons.

 

[LightaDroid]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

I use my smartphone for almost everything.

I would say 90% smartphone to 10% laptop
But there is things I still need my laptop for like lighting programs and netflixs

Posted from Google Nexus 5

 

[Indoler]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

I keep looking for a way to reduce my devices, but I just can't. I still find a desktop invaluable. Doing complicated stuff on small screens is a drag. My 24" monitor and full size ergonomic keyboard is SO much more comfortable, not to mention all the peripherals hooked on. Desktop: irreplaceable.

Tablet: has very limited uses for me, but for what I do use it for, largely Zinio mags and Netflix vids, it is also invaluable and the right choice. (I'd rather read ebooks on my phone.)

The phone is always with me. It's the closest to a universal device. Next to my desktop, this is the one I couldn't live without. There was a time when I'd take my laptop everywhere just for internet access and email, but that time has passed. Even the full size tablet is overkill for that. My phone has eliminated a lot of laptop and tablet use. But the screen isn't big enough for complex stuff like writing long documents.

The laptop is the one I keep thinking I can get rid of as all its uses overlap with other things. Yet, if I go on a trip with just a tablet (Done that!), it sorta works, but it's annoying. The laptop does so much more and so much more easily and comfortably. Plus, if my desktop goes down, which happened last year, I can keep working seamlessly with the laptop. It's invaluable as a backup. For that reason alone, I can't quite get rid of it. I sure can't do my work on a tablet or a phone.

So, while I'm still hoping for more convergence, I can't quite get to the point of getting rid of anything. The closest to going, though, is my laptop. I don't have HUGE business uses for it. I could survive with a tablet, perhaps, if I bought a keyboard. (Of course, at that point, it's sort of a laptop!) But I'd be queasy without a computing backup for business reasons.

If you have a decent laptop, ditch the desktop and the tablet. If you don't have a decent laptop, ditch it too and get a better one with a comfortable screen size. You can probably connect all your peripherals to that laptop, starting with your mouse. You don't need a desktop for all that. You don't need a tablet either because you have your phone and/or your laptop for that.

You will be left with just 2 devices – your phone and your laptop – between which you can handle anything you throw at it. Oh, and your laptop is portable. A desktop isn't.

 

[LeoRex]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

My 24" monitor and full size ergonomic keyboard is SO much more comfortable, not to mention all the peripherals hooked on. Desktop: irreplaceable.

Exactly... in my office, I have two 20inch wide screen monitors a Microsoft Natural ergo keyboard and my trusty logitech M325 wireless mouse. Not exactly something I can replication with a couple of Note 3's and Swiftkey.

 

[UJ95x]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

If you have a decent laptop, ditch the desktop and the tablet. If you don't have a decent laptop, ditch it too and get a better one with a comfortable screen size. You can probably connect all your peripherals to that laptop, starting with your mouse. You don't need a desktop for all that. You don't need a tablet either because you have your phone and/or your laptop for that.

You will be left with just 2 devices – your phone and your laptop – between which you can handle anything you throw at it. Oh, and your laptop is portable. A desktop isn't.

The thing is though, depending on his usage, the laptop might not be able to replace his desktop. A desktop will almost always be more powerful. With a phone and a tablet it's similar, in that his phone might not be able to do tasks as well as a bigger device.

My usage is basically just on my phone and laptop. My tablet and desktop see very little usage, but he might not be able to do the same.

Sent from my Galaxy S4 running SlimKat 4.4.4

 

[monsieurms]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

If you have a decent laptop, ditch the desktop and the tablet. If you don't have a decent laptop, ditch it too and get a better one with a comfortable screen size. You can probably connect all your peripherals to that laptop, starting with your mouse. You don't need a desktop for all that. You don't need a tablet either because you have your phone and/or your laptop for that.

You will be left with just 2 devices – your phone and your laptop – between which you can handle anything you throw at it. Oh, and your laptop is portable. A desktop isn't.

Do you know a laptop with a 24" screen and 4tb of space, 2 BD rw drives, that will handle all my peripherals, including external HDD, scanner, 2 printers, hub, speakers and so on---and still be portable and superfast? (If so, I'd be scared to ask the price!)

Some of those things can be handled by a dock and add-ons, of course. But that gets complicated and isn't so portable. The real reason to have a laptop is portability. If I'm going to get something with such a large screen, internal devices, all those add-ons, it's not going to be easily portable anyway. It will be simpler in desktop config that isn't meant to go anywhere. So, I'm thinking if I get rid of anything, it's the laptop. I can probably make do with a tablet and keyboard one day. At least Microsoft thinks so.

 

[Indoler]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

Do you know a laptop with a 24" screen and 4tb of space, 2 BD rw drives, that will handle all my peripherals, including external HDD, scanner, 2 printers, hub, speakers and so on---and still be portable and superfast? (If so, I'd be scared to ask the price!)

A MacBook Pro can easily handle all those harddrives, scanners, printers and speakers, etc., and is, obviously, portable and superfast, and you can simultaneously hook it up with up to 4x30" displays...
AlienWare laptops aren't half bad either!

So the first thing to ditch is the desktop.

I can probably make do with a tablet and keyboard one day. At least Microsoft thinks so.

Well, they lost billions on the Zune, Windows Phone, Vista, 7, Surface 1, and dozens of other 'novel concepts' over the years so Microsoft is the last bunch I would take advice from!

BTW, to illustrate the above here's a MacBook Pro driving 2 huge displays:

And that is stuff from 3 years ago!!!

 

[Aquila]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

My current setup is: Phone, Tablet, PC Desktop (it'd be really difficult for a laptop to touch it for anywhere near the same price), Chromebook & then the stuff that all that hooks into around the home and office.

The only one that can do everything all of the others can easily enough to forsake the rest is the tablet. The tablet is a large enough screen to be versatile while small enough to fit anywhere, the battery life is superb and it can work with any periferials that I may need for whatever task, be that casting to a larger screen, using a printer, obviously mouse/keyboard, etc. It also has all of my Android apps, which are greatly preferred to the other OS's that I use in most cases. Also, the ability to remote into the other devices is present (as it is in every direction on all of them) and the screen is large enough to navigate smoothly through tasks while remoting in.

The Chromebook is the second best option for getting everything done, however there are times that I really prefer the Android apps to their ChromeOS variants and/or my Chromebook isn't a touchscreen, so that's a drawback. Some ChromeOS apps are MUCH better than Android, and I'm really looking forward to the better interoperatibility that was discussed at Google IO. Obviously the Chromebook works with all peripherals, but despite being light and fairly portable, compared to a tablet it's still a monster in size. Sometimes the larger screen is preferrable.

The phone has all the apps to get everything done, but it's very small and honestly using it for spreadsheets (I don't do a lot of x+y, I do a lot of data analysis with arrays of offset/indirect, etc), while possible, is an exhausting experience due to only being able to see a few cells on the screen at a time it's not easy to write formulas that utilize other tabs or to work within VBA or pivot tables, etc. on the tiny screen. Experience = bad. The same goes for creating presentations, whether through slides, powerpoint, prezi or anything else sucks on a phone. All the tools are there, but it feels like you want a mouse and a bigger screen. All that said, I did write about 80% of one of my Ethics papers last semester on my phone and having the gesture typing made it fun and pretty fast, although I still preferred to do all of the editing at the end with a mouse and giant screens.

Last place is the desktop. It is immobile, meaning I have to sit in front of it in my office in order to have everything function. Even if it were a laptop, the sole purpose of this thing is to handle windows specific games and for long sessions of VBA or other coding where I like having multiple large monitors. Also, the chair in my office is pretty awesome, so sometimes it is not too bad to have to come in here - but I have two toddlers and very much prefer not being tied to any particular room, let alone any particular 3x3' space. Also, Windows is a huge drawback for me, but it's a necessary evil because of two specific apps that I need for work.

 

[Indoler]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

My current setup is: Phone, Tablet, PC Desktop (it'd be really difficult for a laptop to touch it for anywhere near the same price), Chromebook & then the stuff that all that hooks into around the home and office.

The only one that can do everything all of the others can easily enough to forsake the rest is the tablet. The tablet is a large enough screen to be versatile while small enough to fit anywhere, the battery life is superb and it can work with any periferials that I may need for whatever task, be that casting to a larger screen, using a printer, obviously mouse/keyboard, etc. It also has all of my Android apps, which are greatly preferred to the other OS's that I use in most cases. Also, the ability to remote into the other devices is present (as it is in every direction on all of them) and the screen is large enough to navigate smoothly through tasks while remoting in.

The Chromebook is the second best option for getting everything done, however there are times that I really prefer the Android apps to their ChromeOS variants and/or my Chromebook isn't a touchscreen, so that's a drawback. Some ChromeOS apps are MUCH better than Android, and I'm really looking forward to the better interoperatibility that was discussed at Google IO. Obviously the Chromebook works with all peripherals, but despite being light and fairly portable, compared to a tablet it's still a monster in size. Sometimes the larger screen is preferrable.

The phone has all the apps to get everything done, but it's very small and honestly using it for spreadsheets (I don't do a lot of x+y, I do a lot of data analysis with arrays of offset/indirect, etc), while possible, is an exhausting experience due to only being able to see a few cells on the screen at a time it's not easy to write formulas that utilize other tabs or to work within VBA or pivot tables, etc. on the tiny screen. Experience = bad. The same goes for creating presentations, whether through slides, powerpoint, prezi or anything else sucks on a phone. All the tools are there, but it feels like you want a mouse and a bigger screen. All that said, I did write about 80% of one of my Ethics papers last semester on my phone and having the gesture typing made it fun and pretty fast, although I still preferred to do all of the editing at the end with a mouse and giant screens.

Last place is the desktop. It is immobile, meaning I have to sit in front of it in my office in order to have everything function. Even if it were a laptop, the sole purpose of this thing is to handle windows specific games and for long sessions of VBA or other coding where I like having multiple large monitors. Also, the chair in my office is pretty awesome, so sometimes it is not too bad to have to come in here - but I have two toddlers and very much prefer not being tied to any particular room, let alone any particular 3x3' space. Also, Windows is a huge drawback for me, but it's a necessary evil because of two specific apps that I need for work.

You might be interested to know that Huff Post TECH says:
'Best Performing Windows Laptop' Is Apple's 13-Inch MacBook Pro: Study

You can run them both! Windows and MacOSX! At the same time and side-by-side on one screen if you need to! On a MacBook Pro. You can't do that on a Windows laptop.

 

[Aquila]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

You might be interested to know that Huff Post TECH says:
'Best Performing Windows Laptop' Is Apple's 13-Inch MacBook Pro: Study

You can run them both! Windows and MacOSX! At the same time and side-by-side on one screen if you need to! On a MacBook Pro. You can't do that on a Windows laptop.

Seems like that would compound the problem. I already have a laptop that's exactly what I want from a laptop and I have a desktop that almost no laptop can touch without getting above the $2500 range - why would buying another device that can't do well what either of my existing devices can do without issues? I'm not really looking to introduce another ecoysystm, a 13" MPB is less portable than my Chromebook and sucks at running Chrome and I have no desire to have Windows on anything except for a desktop - reasons listed above for the use case. The 13" MBP would be far weaker than my desktop and completely the wrong direction for my portable needs. The MBP, even in dualboot with windows would suck terribly for the games I want to have on PC and it'd be uber fail at running SAS, Access, SSMS and basically anything that requires massive amounts of multithreaded mathematical processing.

If you'd said the 12 core Apple Mac Pro desktop, I might have been inclined to consider it for the at-the-desk needs - but on the other hand, it's still super fail given the horrible priceerformance scaling. A $10k computer should perform at least 5x better than my desktop and it barely does better at anything than my current rig - since I don't make CGI movies or compile full length Hollywood 3D movies filmed in 4k.

For what I do while mobile (content consumption, hangouts, moderating the forums, etc) the tablet is still my best option. For a laptop, there's nothing better on the priceerformance value scale than my Chromebook (IMO) - since one has to break into ultrabooks to get better performance in anything resembling similar build quality, portability and design. I can get a more powerful laptop, but it'll be several pounds heavier and cost at least 2-3x more money. The former negates a large point of the laptop over a desktop while the latter upsets the value proposition. Given that all devices an remote into all other devices - having redundant functionality is counter productive to what I need. There is nothing my Tablet can do that my phone cannot also do, but it is easier to do those things on the tablet in most cases. The same is not true the other direction (for my particular tablet), my phone can do things it cannot - like connect to Verizon's LTE network and make phone calls that aren't VoIP.

Hence, in my opinion, no the smartphone is not ready to replace the laptop - while it can easily match the functionality in many ways (or mimic in all), it cannot match the ease of use that having a much larger screen and/or several productivity enhancing peripherals that most laptops can natively support with better quality and in more concurrent volume. Each device I have has a pretty specific set of things it does great and things that could use improvement and right now, there are valid reasons for retaining each. If I had to slim down, I'd end at a phone and a desktop - but those are my 3rd and 4th choices for most tasks that I use mobile computers for.

 

[Indoler]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

Seems like that would compound the problem. I already have a laptop that's exactly what I want from a laptop and I have a desktop that almost no laptop can touch without getting above the $2500 range - why would buying another device that can't do well what either of my existing devices can do without issues? I'm not really looking to introduce another ecoysystm, a 13" MPB is less portable than my Chromebook and sucks at running Chrome and I have no desire to have Windows on anything except for a desktop - reasons listed above for the use case. The 13" MBP would be far weaker than my desktop and completely the wrong direction for my portable needs. The MBP, even in dualboot with windows would suck terribly for the games I want to have on PC and it'd be uber fail at running SAS, Access, SSMS and basically anything that requires massive amounts of multithreaded mathematical processing.

Most people – like 99% – do a lot less on their computers. So I don't think you are a yardstick to go by for all practical purposes.

 

[Aquila]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

Most people – like 99% – do a lot less on their computers. So I don't think you are a yardstick to go by for all practical purposes.

I agree. My opinions in this only reference my personal needs. I generally think most people could manage most of their things on either an Android or iOS phone and be totally fine.

 

[12er]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

Currently I am using my PC and my Notebook a lot more than my mobile devices, because with a mouse and a physical keyboard I can get a manifold more work done than with a softwarekeyboard, where I frequently type in the wrong characters without noticing that. On any of my mobile devices it would take me several minutes instead a fraction of a minute to type this text, and I would also forget throughout writing the text, what I actually wanted to say. Even if there were good IDEs for Android on the market I would prefer using my PC for programming, because this way I am a lot more productive. On my mobile devices I very often end up wasting my time and watching videos of cute kitties or playing Angry Birds instead of getting something done. Hence there currently is no mobile device which could replace my PC or notebook.

 

[monsieurms]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

One thing that I have learned, having just gotten a new laptop that is a real laptop, but with a touchscreen---having a touchscreen is wayyyyyyyy useful. It makes the laptop sing. I'm thinking now of getting one for my desktop, too. Integrating touch with mouse and keyboard is the perfect trilogy. I can't imagine ever buying a new laptop again without a touchscreen. So, to that extent, convergence has made laptops better!

 

[slennon]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

I'm using smartphone only for games and calls. Can't write text in it, it so incovinient. So current vision of smarphones will make to use smartphones more often.

 

[inderhayer]

Re: Smartphone .vs. Laptop

Not 100 % smartphone replaced laptop for me. I preferred most of time smart phone but for playing big games i preferred laptop.