Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #152 6/6/2012


Question: What is a tablet?

Answer:

A tablet pc is a smaller portable type computer. Tablets have been around a number of years but have gotten much more popular in the last couple years. They are fully functioning computers but look different and smaller

Sizes of computers that people usually use are desktop, laptop, netbook/notebook, tablet and cell phones. Those are going from physically larger to smaller. With the increased capability of computers sometimes the smaller out perform the larger.

Tablet computers are computers that are small (sometimes people think of size as like a tablet of paper). They are a single unit design. They appear to be just a flat screen, but actually the processing capabilities are behind the screen. They also have no keyboard but the keyboard appears on the screen when needed.

More often you are just using the screen as your input device as it is a touch screen. By being a touch screen different pictures or icons on the screen can just be touched by your finger and chosen. The screen has drawing abilities so you can sketch with your finger on the screen.

Effectively this means you hold the tablet like you used to hold or carry paper and then you can enter information like you write on paper but now stored electronically. Many of your cell phones have these capabilities too, but it is a smaller screen and harder to for many to use the touch screen.

Tablets are good devices for a lot of purposes. I see a lot of people use them to take to class or meetings to enter notes in and be able to look stuff up.

Thanks to Evelyn for the question