The choice is yours, but how do you choose? First you must know what each type is used for, generally speaking, and ask yourself what you will need it for, what are your tech needs, the editing guru in the dark tiny room, the coffee house writer in BK Lounge sucking free Wi-Fi, or the waiting line at the DMV playing Plants vs Zombies.
Desktops: To start with a desktop is just that, it sits on your desktop or under it and purrs like a kitten and roars like a gentle wave rippling down the beach. Yes ladies and gentlemen this is the computer for you if you want raw Home Improvement power! Desktops have much more space within the tower chassis and therefore circulate heat better, hold more memory, and are much easier to upgrade. Depending on the innards it will consume much more power than your battery operated machines, but you won’t notice because it doesn't have a battery to constantly bother you with. The cons of such a machine would be quite obvious, it is not easily mobile, unless you strap it to a rolling chair and get a car battery a la Brave Little Toaster.
Laptops: For the office worker on the move, laptops provide power and ease of use into a compact package. While they might not be the thinnest item you can get it doesn't mean they can not have their uses. Laptops contain a dedicated keyboard and touch mouse all in one system and beat out tablets in speed of typing and ease of surfing use. The best part is actually being able to see where your mouse is clicking without guessing with a touch screen if you've got the sausage fingers. The two main issues with laptops will be battery life and overheating issues. Laptops generally use operating systems designed for a broad spectrum of PC’s and is not necessarily tailored to suit laptops needs. Windows Vista was notorious for being a CPU power hog and would drag even larger desktop replacement laptops down into a bog of eternal power consumption and lap burning radiating heat.
Tablets: The world electronics markets response to the Ipad, like the Iphone and smart phones before it, the Tablet is a reactionary item. Basically a giant smart phone, if you want it put bluntly. The large touch screen has been a staple of the tablet since Microsoft tried to shove it down our throats in the early 2000’s. The tablets strengths are its simplicity. You can do anything with it that you can do with a net book but due to software and hardware restrictions mainstream applications cannot be used on it, which is why the app industry has blossomed so quickly within the last few years. Also most don’t have keyboards that come standard so writing that blog with the touch screen may take some time. The cons would be that either you love it and it becomes a part of your life, or you realize you only bought it for the novelty and its collecting dust like that PDA you once bought, remember PDA’s?
Hybrids: They’re lap-tablets, touch-tops, keyboardian-things. Knowing that tablets would be a kind of hard sell, man invented the hybrid, a best of both worlds in which the tablet was the screen of the laptop part and vice versa, some detachable, some swivilable, almost Transformer like in their operation. But when you get down to it, what is it really? Is it more spork or Reese’s PB cup? Well its kind of hard to say, and only time will tell. It would appear that the hybrids design negates most of the negative aspects of the tablet, but adds more complex moving parts to the equation. Which in anything tech isn't a very good sign. Things break, it’s the nature of the universe, especially nimble things like swiveling screens. Sit on a regular laptop, say your sorry to it and hopefully it’ll be fine, sit on one of these and pray your still under warranty.
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