Any chance PCS will offer tablets or touch screen laptops?

I've had two great laptops from PCS, and with the whole shift to tablets/hybrids coming later this year I was wondering if PCS have any plans to offer these devices?

At present we are not planning on stocking any tablet devices but we may well look into touch screen devices. I very much doubt that there will be a complete shift towards tablets as people still need keyboards and mice. Initial reviews of Windows 8 are not as positive as I would have thought and I think touch screen computing will take a bit of getting used to by some customers.

PCS said:

At present we are not planning on stocking any cheap android tablet devices but we may well look into touch screen devices. I very much doubt that there will be a complete shift towards tablets as people still need keyboards and mice. Initial reviews of Windows 8 are not as positive as I would have thought and I think touch screen computing will take a bit of getting used to by some customers.

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But some people want the new generation, I mean they want the latest technology. As far as I know (i think) they dont need keyboard or mice anymore..Thats y Tablets are born..

autism said:

But some people want the new generation, I mean they want the latest technology. As far as I know (i think) they dont need keyboard or mice anymore..Thats y Tablets are born..

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The majority of people that PCS appeal to do need a keyboard and mouse still. And the general public still do otherwise they wouldn't have released hybrid tablets with clip-on keyboards.

Tablets appeal to a different market of people, they're mainly for quick and easy access while travelling or maybe while lying on the sofa. They're not for hardcore gamers or people into intensive editing or 3D modelling. If you look on the 'Check my spec' section of the forum you will see a lot more threads of people asking for Gaming, editing or music production spec's than you will of "I want a computer that can browse the web and play little apps".

I'm not saying tablets are pointless, I'm just saying there's already hundreds of different models out there already and the Custom PC market is already niche enough without adding Custom Tablets.

P.s. I typed this from a keyboard. Typing from a tablet would have been horrible.

We have just started offering tablets: http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/tablets/

We have listed these predominantly for our customers who want to tablet to tag onto their main PC, notebook or AIO order. However, as time goes forwards keep an eye out for hybrids and more touch screen devices.

In my long (30+ years) career in computing I've seen this "what you have is scrap" hype many times before. When distributed computing was developed in the 1980's they said that "mainframes are dead" and yet they are still a critical part of most large organisation's data centres. When the world wide web made it's appearance in the mid-1990's they said "PC's are dead, we'll all be using thin-clients" and yet only now (nearly 20 years later) with the Google Chromebook are we beginning to see anything resembling that. They said that desktops were dead when they developed laptops, and I've lost count how many times I've heard that Windows will be replaced by Linux (of whatever flavour). And don't get me started on "cloud computing", the 3G mobile broadband connection I'm using just wont support the data rates and I can't afford the data volume! Not everyone lives in a big city with megabyte/second data rates measured in double figures.

Tablets (and smartphones) are a very useful tool, but they are not the "Holy Grail" of personal computing and they cannot ever be everything to every user. Graphic designers and artists for a start will always need a mouse or stylus (the human finger just doesn't have enough resolution for artwork) and document publishers (among others) will always want a proper keyboard.

I have to say also that I find the "we want the latest technology" argument a tad strange. Computers of all types are just tools, they allow us to do stuff we couldn't otherwise do. If a tablet is the right tool for the stuff you need to do then by all means get one but please don't get a tablet just because it's new. Mind you, Apple have made a fortune persuading people that they have to have the latest toy....