Laptops

Smartphone, Tablet, or Laptop: Which is Best for Students?

by Sayan Dey September 21, 2022 0 comments

The shift to online education has been brewing slowly over the last decade. The pandemic accelerated the shift and made online education a basic requirement for every student. Just as the pandemic is gone, but face masks remain, offline education is back but online education continues to remain. In order to reap the full benefits of online education, every student needs a good device to attend online classes, complete their assignments, download study materials, etc. While laptops are highly recommended for online classes, many students still end up using a smartphone or tablet for the job. Let’s understand the pros and cons of using each device.

Why Smartphones are not the Right Choice?

Technically, it’s possible to attend online classes on smartphones. The devices are extremely versatile and have the required apps that are normally used for online classes like MS Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, etc. However, the challenge is their small form factor. Their small screen size makes it difficult to view what’s being taught on the screen. Multi-tasking is also difficult on smartphones. It’s extremely tedious to use an app for notes taking while attending an online class. Moreover, smartphones can also be very distracting because people run multiple apps on them. Students can’t really pay attention in class if the phone keeps popping notifications from their Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or other apps. Doing assignments on smartphones is also very difficult. All these factors make smartphones unsuitable for online education and learning.

Tablet vs. Laptop

While tablets are great for content consumption due to their bigger and brighter displays, they cannot be used as content creation devices. Therefore, students can’t really use tablets to complete their assignments as it’s highly inconvenient to type on a virtual touchscreen. Laptops are more viable here. Recording lecture videos on the go, completing assignments, and even conducting online research are easier to do on a laptop. Neither smartphone nor tablet can match this versatility.

Some Tips on Choosing the Right Laptop

Investing in a laptop for students is as crucial as investing in education these days. Depending upon the study requirements, the choice of a PC can vary. One thing to keep in mind is that a laptop is not a lifetime investment. They have a certain lifecycle after which you have to invest in a new laptop. As a parent, it is best to understand your child’s education needs before investing in a laptop.

Computational requirements of a school student, engineering grad, arts college, or creative field differ in many ways. So, careful investment is advised to have no compromises in learning and to ensure the best value for money. Also, critical aspects like screen size & weight are essential so that it neither takes up a lot of space in the backpack nor increases the weight too much. Busy school days will require a decent battery backup so the laptop can withstand the day. Also, due to the limited knowledge about computers as a student, official brand/customer support becomes a pivotal point to look for.

Some Laptop Recommendations for Students

For a school student at the junior basic level, an entry-level laptop is fine. A laptop with a popular entry-level CPU like AMD Ryzen 3 is the way to go. You could check out the HP Laptop 15s-eq2146AU that comes with the latest Ryzen 3 5300U CPU, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB M.2 SSD storage, and FHD 1080p display. Due to the lower power consumption of entry-level CPUs and the absence of a dedicated GPU, the device mentioned above provides 9+ hours of battery backup.

But if you are investing for your kid at high school as a parent, try to look for a more powerful device. The HP Laptop 15s-fq5007TU is an excellent choice to help your kid in high school and support college-level study. Powered by the latest 12th gen Intel i3 (6 Core 8 thread) CPU, it will support a student’s computation needs for years.

Things get serious when investing in a laptop for graduate-level students. Those from creative fields like Architecture, Animation, and Cinematography, or advanced IT fields like Deep Learning, Data Science, and AI, call for high-end, robust computation solutions. Students should carefully balance processing and rendering power while choosing a laptop for their specific needs. One laptop that suits the needs of all the fields above, I can recommend the new HP ENVY Laptop 16-h0028TX, which comes with a 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700H CPU, 16 GB DDR5-4800 MHz RAM, Intel Arc A370M Graphics (4 GB GDDR6) GPU, 16-inch diagonal UHD+ (3840 x 2400) display, and 9+ hours of battery backup.

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