Comment by FakeComments
7 years ago
A 10” screen has a twentieth the screen estate of my workstation screens, and is the difference of a narrow point of attention and spanning my view.
It’s bordering on absurdism to try and utilize the same UI between them, and simply doesn’t match the reality of human perception or tool use.
There are certainly uses where it makes sense — people who use just a phone and laptop for the internet and documents, for instance — and arguments to be made for consistency in styling or icons, but there’s also a lot of use cases where they’re different kinds of tools, even if both use computer chips, and it makes sense to have different UIs.
I appreciate Microsoft offering the other option in Windows 10: that I can use a tablet UI in tablet mode and a desktop UI in laptop mode.
A 10" screen is 71 inches square. A square foot is 144 inches square. You are saying your working area is about 10 square feet and ergo nobody could possibly want the same applications on a machine with 2 27" monitors as one 10" or even 6" screen despite many tasks being useful on both because SOME tasks are not.
An absolute ton of people use actual computers with 12" - 14" screens including for complex tasks they just switch tasks more which is probably less efficient but hardly impossible.
They may opt to dock their machine at home/work for a larger work area but as it happens many tasks may cross both environments.
For example at home you may have many windows visible at once one of which is a document you are reading or a video you are watching another an editor in which you are writing documentation or code. After you undock you may wish to continue SOME of the tasks on the smaller screen for example watching the video or reading the document but opt to defer others until you have richer input and display options.
Lets go a level deeper. Your device is a general purpose computer. It could in theory run 2 entirely different UI stacks that run on the same OS and access the same files. Its the files that are the vital thing. If you create a video in one stack and merely watch it in another what of it.
Convergence is merely the idea that you will eventually be able to carry a small enough cheap enough computer in your pocket that it wont make much sense for many people to lug around 2 different portable computers.
This seems as inevitable as computers going from buildings to something we lug around in the first place.
A 10" screen has more pixel resolution than any computer I'd used over at least a 25 year period, and well into the mid 2000s.
Yes, high-def large retina screens now (and I'm looking at one) exceed this, but as a traveller, a 10" tablet with a real goddamned operating system is a total game-changer.
Mind, I don't quite have that. I've got a 9" Android tablet with Termux that is pretty good, despite some profound limitations (mostly of the OS and Apps, some from the input, though a Bluetooth keyboard makes this a tractable laptop substitute most of the time). It's absolutely possible to get Real Work done. Though I'd prefer something bigger and less in my way, and am looking with strong interest at PureOS.