Dual-Screen, Detachable And Windows 8 Star At Computex; But Will Consumers Really Embrace Hybrids?

The Register’s Phil Muncaster reports that Taiwanese computing giants Acer and Asus faced off ahead of the start of Asias biggest IT expo, Computex, with a slew of new Windows 8 products including dual-screen laptops, notebook-tablet hybrids and even an all-in-one PC that can be used as a giant tablet.

Muncaster notes that as always at the Taipei-based gadget show, pricing and specs are hard to come by, but he says most of the models shown appeared to be fully working machines, with the possible exception of the prototype Transformer AiO.

Convertible Notebooks Will Sell, But For How Long?

However, ZNet’s James Kendrick predicts that the flashy new convertible notebooks with Windows 8 being shown off by Intel, Microsoft, and PC makers are at Computex this week may attract buyers, it won’t be long before reality sets in.

He notes that these hybrid machines combine touch tablets — the market everyone desperately wants to break into — with some form of a keyboard to turn them into pseudo-laptops, the hope being that by offering multiple configurations they can appeal to everyone. But Kendrick posits that many hybrid purchasers will either come to realize that a good tablet is all they need almost all the time, finding the keyboard something they don’t reach for very often, or that over time they’ll end up using the hybrid as a laptop almost all of the time, rarely using the tablet as a tablet, and since convertibles will be more expensive than conventional tablets or notebooks, with more complexity and more potential for component failure during normal usage, the result will be widespread buyer’s remorse.

While I’ve been something of a tentative vicarious advocate of convertible hybrids, and I think I would personally make use of both modes as intended, I concede that Kendrick probably has a point, especially about the higher cost and greater potential for breakage. Much as I would relish having my life decomplicated by paring down to one do-all machine, the MacBook/iPad tag team I use now has its virtues.