Today’s artist is not limited to pencil and paper. The digitization of the world has long been a part of the creative crowd and with the availability of touch screen laptops today even the most amateur can get a taste of expressing art directing into digital form.
Many people however use a touch screen laptop for more common activities such as handwriting and to manage objects and applications. Many more people would like such a functionality but did not have the foresight to buy a touch screen tablet laptop.
Whatever the case, if you have a laptop and would like some of the conveniences of a tablet PC, all you need is to add the touch screen feature which is now an available option for approximately $130 thanks to the TabletLaptop by NAVIsis.
The device is very much plug and play with most of the common household Windows operating systems. It works with Windows 2000, XP, XP-Tablet, and Windows Vista. The minimum CPU requirement is Pentium 500MHz or equivalent which I can’t imagine anyone using anything less than that, although I should be careful not everyone is as fortunate to be addicted to the latest greatest technological gadgets we don’t really need, but I digress. The input is a standard USB 1.1 and you will need an optical disk drive for the CD.
One of the coolest features is the integration with Microsoft Office products. When in the Outlook application, it allows you to compose and send handwritten emails for a nice personal touch. Of course the standard touch screen features are included suc as using your fingers to resize and flip through pictures and media.
The few downsides are that while they’ve tried to compact it as much as possible, and the website claims it’s a compact size and design, any addon to a laptop just defeats the purpose of being portable and convenient, which no laptop really is.
Touch screen laptops are built with swivel screens that allow for flipping and folding backwards to turn it into a tablet for writing or drawing. This is a limitation of adding the touch screen functionality to a regular laptop. It still can not turn itself into a tablet and that really is a huge difference since writing or drawing on the regular laptop screen is not quite as intuitive as a true touch screen laptop in tablet mode.
