Touchscreens Are Cool But They Aren’t Always Necessary

Touchscreens Are Cool But They Aren’t Always Necessary

Touchscreen technology has changed the way that a lot of people access popular devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and even laptops. Children that grow up in the modern world are so accustomed to using touchscreen technology that any monitor or screen that doesn’t have touchscreen features is seen as strange. Is the world moving in a direction where ordinary screens are antiquated? Perhaps–but perhaps not.

We’ll be asking some of the hard questions regarding touchscreen technology, including whether it is or isn’t necessary for your computer to have one.

Options

Even though the word “computer” might create a very specific image in your mind, there are a lot of devices out there that could technically classify as a computer. There is the classic tower and monitor PC setup, but there are also laptops and other types of devices that are even more powerful than some of the earlier models of computers.

Laptops

To an extent, a touchscreen laptop kind of makes sense. The touchpad is easier to use than a trackpad on many devices, and the screen tends to be right in your workspace so why not put it to use? Granted, there are a couple of downsides to a touchscreen, chief among them being a decrease in battery life. The touchscreen draws a lot of power from the battery, and because it’s basically on all the time, the power drain can be significant (up to 20%). You also have to consider the time spent on maintaining and cleaning the device to make sure it stays in proper working order. Finally, including a touchscreen is sure to increase the price, as the more features a device has, the higher the cost is inevitably going to be.

Desktops

A touchscreen for the typical tower and display workstation doesn’t really make sense from a practical standpoint, and it certainly isn’t worth the cost unless you really want that functionality. If you think about how large your typical monitor is, not to mention the sheer number of monitors some users have, you get to a point where it’s just not worth the investment to use a touchscreen monitor. Laptops make more efficient use of these screens, as they are smaller and more compact. Combine this with the fact that most laptops don’t have a mouse and instead use trackpads, and you have a clear-cut winner in terms of which makes more efficient use of a touchscreen. It just doesn’t make sense from a business perspective to use a touchscreen monitor for your desktop workstation.

All-in-Ones

Some might think that all-in-one devices are a specific kind of desktop, but all-in-one computers are more like a hybrid device than an actual workstation or desktop. They take advantage of the many benefits of a laptop, but without the trade-offs of them. They combine the features and dynamics of a laptop touchscreen with the full power of a desktop. Of course, they also have to deal with the smudging and fingerprinting of these devices, but it’s a small price to pay for the benefits of a touchscreen. Check out some great HP All-in-One’s here.

Mobile Devices

Thanks to the touchscreen, most people have miniature computers in their pocket now known as smartphones. In fact, as of October 2016, more people own smartphones than own full-fledged desktops. Processors continue to grow smaller and stronger, meaning that more can be done with less. Mobile devices wouldn’t be where they are today if they weren’t taking advantage of touchscreen technology.

As for your own business, how will you take advantage of touchscreen technology? Are you making the most efficient purchases for your specific business needs? To find out, reach out to us at (877) 771-2384.

Tip of the Week: How to Cut Back on Your Mobile Data Use

Tip of the Week: How to Cut Back on Your Mobile Data Use

One of the biggest benefits of mobile data is how useful it is to business users for networking and productivity while they’re on-the-go.

However, one of the biggest drawbacks to mobile data is how easy it is to use up while networking and being productive, and how expensive this can be. Fortunately, there are some ways to reduce the amount of data an Android device uses, as we’ll discuss in this tip.

Diagnosing Data Usage

The first step to using less data is to know where your data is being used. Therefore, it only makes sense to identify where your data is going. Accessing the System Settings and navigating to Network & Internet will give you the option to check your Mobile data usage. This screen will show you which applications used what amount of data, and going into each listed application, if that data was used in the background or through the user’s actual activity.

Capping Apps

Once you know where your data is going, you can put some stops in place to keep it from all funneling out. There are quite a few ways to do this:

Limit Updates

There are many applications that are notorious for refreshing themselves regularly – which means that they burn through mobile data at a pretty consistent basis. Social media applications are prime examples of such apps. There are two methods to cutting back how often these applications update their information.

First, go into each app’s settings and try to find an option that will reduce the amount of data that an app consumes in the background. If that doesn’t work, return to your system settings and access that particular application’s settings from there to deactivate background data. Of course, this isn’t the best idea with some apps, like messaging apps, that need to refresh in the background to function properly.

Deactivate Some Features

Many apps also have baked-in features that tend to chew up more data than necessary, like auto-play and high-quality streaming. Again, by accessing each app’s settings, you should find the option to limit the amount of mobile data that is used. Activating these options will greatly reduce the data that these applications leech out during your use of them.

Prepare in Advance

Whenever possible, downloading the content you want to view ahead of time also helps reduce your mobile data consumption. By utilizing WiFi, you avoid chewing through your allotted mobile data and will then have it stored for later viewing at your leisure.

You can even do this with Google Maps – by searching for the area in which you’ll need to navigate, you can download that area’s information to access it later in the Offline Maps section.

Clearly, there is no shortage of ways that you can trim back your mobile data usage – and you should encourage your employees to do the same.

Check back here for more IT tips.

The Tangled History of Wireless Charging

The Tangled History of Wireless Charging

Wireless charging is a true conundrum. Sure, it’s a brilliant idea. On the surface, there are no drawbacks. No more charging cords or adapters, unless you count the one that will always be plugged into the wall. Today we take a look at the history of wireless charging, why it hasn’t taken over yet, and future options that will let us really charge our devices wirelessly.

A Little Background

As long as there have been need for it, people have been trying to go wireless. In fact, Nikola Tesla, one of the great minds in world history, spent most of his life on this problem. Of course at that time, electricity as a utility wasn’t a thing, and his plan was to create a device that would produce a magnetic field, theoretically allowing electrical currents to be transmitted through the ether. By developing the Tesla coil, he proved this to be possible. He was never able to deal with the fatal drawbacks that persisted, however. You know, open charges of electricity moving through the air has a tendency to frighten people, especially after a murderous elephant was fried using them to make a point.

As the technology moved on from Tesla, the Tesla coil was innovated upon, and eventually was incorporated in contemporary radar systems. As it became more powerful, the utility for such a technology wasn’t available. For years the work of people at the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, and many private sector organizations was largely wasted as the technology didn’t seem to have a market.

The Smartphone

Despite the boom in consumer electronics in the last third of the 20th Century, not many devices took advantage of wireless charging technology, because not many of them were mobile at all (more on that later). Cellular phones, however, were mobile, and gave manufacturers a reason to revisit wireless charging technologies. At first cellular phones, and some commercial electronics (like razors) had docks. Then it happened…people realized that no matter what, there would be a wire necessary. Even in the most modern smartphones that have wireless charging, the dock is plugged into a power source.

Sure, the smartphone brought wireless charging to the attention of the masses, but since there is very little difference between connecting a wire at the base of device and situating the device on a charging pad just-so, it hasn’t yet become a true wireless technology. Now there are pads, bowls, and all types of other wireless charging docks, but they still all need to have a source of energy attached. A few companies have started utilizing the natural world as their energy source. In fact for as little as $25 you can get a solar wireless charging bank that has a pretty-good-sized 5000mAh battery in it, but you need to connect it to the smartphone via, you guessed it, a wire. You can get a wireless charging dock that you can charge beforehand, and while that is closer than ever to true wireless experience, you still have to charge it with a wire.

Actually Wireless

The truth is that every charging platform is going to need a source of power, so wireless charging for mobile isn’t going to be attained until people master the use of technologies that are:

Effective at charging mobile devices with wireless charging capability.
Not overly harmful to people.

Seems like a pretty easy list to meet, right? No one has brought a product to market yet. As we said earlier, wireless charging is a true conundrum. Today, there are numerous institutions trying to figure out the specifics that will allow us to charge our devices without restriction. Silicon Valley-based Energous, Ossia in Bellevue, Washington, and Santa Monica, California’s uBeam all have begun to develop technologies that meet the criteria above. As they develop “uncoupled” power solutions, the future becomes now.

The idea behind the technology is that wireless power sources will supply the necessary juice to not only smartphones, but wearables, hearing aids, and a litany of sensors that are increasingly being placed inside products. The problem now becomes how to utilize this technology, and how to market it. In fact, market analysts actually expect pad-based technology (like QI chargers) demand to increase, even as this new tech ramps up development. This is a direct result of the negligible amount of devices that currently support wireless charging. There just isn’t any platform that will meet the needs of consumers that include: creativity, affordability, and the ability to ubiquitously charge devices within range of the charger.

So currently, wireless charging is an oxymoron and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Do you have a device that can be charged wirelessly? Do you find it useful? Leave your comments below and return to our blog regularly.