Touchscreen Laptops: "More useful than you'd think"

Sean Hollister of The Verge reviewing the HP Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook 4 (!?!):

To prepare for the Windows 8 onslaught, laptop manufacturers are trying all sorts of inventive touchscreen notebook designs. Some screens flip, some spin, some twist, and some can actually be detached from their keyboards so you can have a tablet for the road. However, the craziest new laptop design may be the simplest of all: simply graft a touchscreen onto an existing clamshell....

The Envy TouchSmart has a fantastic touchscreen, but a sub-par display. Let me make that clear: Every time I touched the screen, the capacitive digitizer never missed a beat. Every single Windows 8 gesture worked instantly and flawlessly. In fact, it was so much more responsive than the laptop's actual touchpad that I found myself touching the screen quite a lot.

.... you can most definitely place your forearms on the palmrest and put one thumb on either side of the display for quick multitasking, or reach out and stab Windows 8's Live Tiles with an index finger on occasion. Surprisingly, the best reasons to use the touchscreen aren't either of those, though. It's scrolling and zooming, which are so much more intuitive and responsive on the screen than with either the touchpad or keyboard.

.... it does indeed prove the value of a touchscreen in Windows 8, even if it has to be grafted onto the display. For what's basically a $50 premium over the vanilla Envy 4, I'd definitely recommend adding the touchscreen.

We've been talking about whether or not touchable displays really belonged in the laptop form factor for a long time. What really set the debate on fire was the below image from Apple's October 2010's "Back to the Mac" keynote.

Steve Jobs:

We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible. Touch surfaces want to be horizontal, hence pads.

He was completely right - extending your arm to touch a screen even a little bit simply isn't comfortable after just a minute or two. It's basic ergonomics, and apparently some engineers call it "Gorilla Arm" and describe it as being, "the touchscreen equivalent of carpal-tunnel syndrome."

The fact is, though, that 2010 was a much simpler time in desktop computing. It was obvious that Windows 7 + Touch was a downright crappy experience, and Apple's reasoning for not adding that input method to OS X was (and still is) logically sound. There would be no outright benefit to adding touch to the OS's of that day, and Apple was smart enough to recognize that and avoid the temptation.

But now we have Windows 8 coming along, and boy is it making a lot of geeks fume (for a lot of reasons). Someday I'd like to explore this discussion in depth, but for now I just want to re-explore this one facet of the controversy: that touch doesn't belong in the laptop form factor.

Whether it works depends just as much on software as hardware

This past weekend I visited the Microsoft Store in Boston to see the Microsoft Surface for myself. I'll write about my experience with the Surface another time, but one of the coolest realizations about Windows 8 came to me when I played with the Acer Aspire S7 ultrabook they had there.

The laptop itself is alright (I'm not a fan of the "Professionally Tested" text to the top right of the keyboard - I mean, what the heck does that even mean?) but what surprised me was how much easier navigating the Metro UI (I don't care) was with touch than with the touchpad. The touchpad was pretty good - not quite as good as a Mac's but fine compared to some of the other machines there, but even if it were perfect I don't think I could whip through the OS as easily as I could with my two thumbs and forefingers. Switching between apps, accessing the Charms bar for quick emailing/searching/etc, and just generally getting to where I wanted to go was really pleasant with my arms resting easily to the left and right of the small laptop.

Feeling how fluid it was immediately made me think of what using iOS is like in a vertical position. I do this pretty frequently both in my dorm and out in the cafeteria to read articles or look through my notes, and although switching between apps and getting to what I want is pretty easy in iOS, I think Windows 8 may have an edge when it comes to general OS navigation in a vertical position. I find myself double-clicking my iPad's Home button a lot when switching between things, and searching for an app or something on Google is slightly more difficult with a series of gentle vertical taps than it is with a slim keyboard right next to your hands (like the Surface's Touch Cover or the S7's slim body).

It's kind of odd - here I am being told that vertically-positioned touch screens don't work on laptops, but it works perfectly fine on my vertically-standing iPad 2. My iPad is constantly being propped vertically by a Smart Cover next to my monitor, and I tap on it frequently between games of Starcraft or while half-watching something on Netflix. The only difference between these two form factors (on a desk, at least) is basically the keyboard, but in the case of the Surface or today's MacBook Air-inspired ultrabooks the keyboard is hardly thick or intrusive (it's a different story for the hard-edged MacBook Pro). Maybe what makes touching a laptop's screen feel right is a combination of both software and super-thin hardware - Intel's Ultrabook Initiative seems to have come at a good time.

Given the choice, you'll want to have a touch screen with Windows 8

When my grandma was transitioning away from her aging laptop (which she used for email, surfing the web, and taking occasional notes) to an iPad 3, there was a period of time during which she wanted to keep the PC handy just in case she needed it for something. At one point, after just a few days of using the iPad full-time, my Dad asked my grandma to find something in Outlook. She sat down and immediately tapped the Outlook icon on the screen.

Nobody said anything. She paused for a second, as if waiting for it to start up, and then tapped the screen again.

She suddenly remembered that her laptop didn't have a touch screen like her iPad, and we all laughed at the silly mistake. The silliest thing (in my mind, at least)? Her laptop should have responded to that tap. Outlook would have started, and then she would have used her mouse to forward the email to my Dad, typing in a short message to go with it. A touch screen in that situation would have made her faster and more efficient - it wouldn't have been the terrible strain-inducing experience that many seem to think using Windows 8 on a laptop will be like.

After trying the next generation of laptops myself, I have to agree with Sean - a touchscreen on a Windows 8 laptop will likely be more useful than we think. To all of the people who can't stand it when people tap on their screen: I'm sorry, but it's going to happen a lot more often in the future. Whether or not you personally think touch belongs in every form factor, PC-makers aren't showing any signs of restraint - they're going to continue putting touch screens into every product from here on out except for their barest of bare-bones piece-of-crap netbooks. Microsoft's Metro UI on a touchable laptop, somewhat shockingly, may not be as universally disliked as we geeks seem to think. If it is, it'll be for other reasons (like the limited Mail functionality, app selection, and learning barrier) - not because people don't like being able to touch things on their laptop's screen.

Try not to knock it before you try it

Windows 8's edge-based UI mechanism actually makes touching a laptop's screen feel right in certain situations. Editing in Photoshop or working in Avid obviously isn't going to be touch-friendly, but switching between apps, changing a setting, or rearranging the Start Screen could very well be easier using one-to-one touch manipulation than indirectly controlling a mouse via a touchpad.

Touchpads will have their place in Windows 8 laptops, but I suspect that a lot of people will be more efficient using them in combination with, not instead of, a touchable display.

I'm going to write more about this in the coming weeks, but for now just visualize what the average person looks like when using a laptop with a touchpad. If you're in college, just look around you the next time you're in the cafeteria. One finger gently sliding as they stare at the screen. Sometimes two, as they drag their way through an article about mountain-biking. Natural and comfortable, the way it should be. Now they want to share that article with a few of their friends on Facebook and check the weather for the upcoming week: are a few taps on the screen a harder way of doing that compared to using the touchpad?

I get the feeling that the answer isn't the resounding "Yes!" many of us expected it to be.

Read the beginning of the comments section in the Envy review. A lot of back and forth right now, but I think we'll reach a consensus pretty soon.