With the lines between laptops and tablets continuing to blur, recent reports online have suggested that Samsung is preparing to bring an Android laptop to the market.
Android Laptop
Many people among our customers in Ashbourne, Ratoath, Meath and surrounding counties have fully adopted the tablet technology in recent years, but due to the fact that they need to create documents they also carry around a laptop. Many tech providers are looking to solve this problem. It will be interesting from the point of PC repairs and PC maintenance to see how durable these devices are.
HP is preparing to introduce its Slatebook x2 in August, a hybrid tablet device that docks onto a detachable keyboard base to appear like a standard laptop. The base houses a built-in mousepad that supports Android gestures such as swipe, pinch and zoom. With its extra battery pack to extend use between charges, the base serves as a counterweight against the heavier tablet screen. The device can essentially be used as a tablet, but with laptop productivity.
Like similar Samsung devices, the HP device is another slant on the popular ASUS Transformer pad series. ASUS also offer tablets that dock onto full QWERTY keyboards with SD card slots and USBs, and which greatly extend battery life. Docking on to the base does not impinge on the touchscreen functionality.
Analysts have suggested, however, that Samsung might just be jumping the gun with a conventional clamshell laptop running Android. Samsung are eager to be among the first movers in the Android laptop segment, but Google has been forced to delay release of the next-gen Android 5 operating system. (Android 5 is meant to bridge the gap between phones and laptops.) So Samsung may attempt to run the new laptop on Android 4x Jelly Bean or similar, an OS created to unify tablet and smartphone formats. Critics say the new device might have issues, as the current Android OS is not well supported for laptops.
Another factor is that Google will now have two competing operating systems in the market—Android and the Chrome OS. Will Google allow two competing in-house operating systems to confuse their potential customers, or will they choose to kill off one of them?
Whatever the case, its fans are heralding the day when Android will become the OS of choice for laptops. While online critics and tech writers have mostly come up on Windows or Apple operating systems, a whole new generation of young users have grown up on phones running Android systems. Young business people often carry out a great deal of their transactions on a smartphone or tablet, and when scaling up their business, will look for Android-enabled laptops that sync with their phone.
The Android laptop is coming—it’s just a matter of when. Whether Samsung are striking at the right moment remains to be seen.
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