Introduced a number of decades ago as a way to make computers more portable, the Notebook PC has underwent many forms and subforms, if you will. My general choice of laptop is a 2010 Lenovo ThinkPad X201 with some upgrades and a good install of Arch Linux. I feel it only right to tackle the elephant in the room brought up simply by mentioning that the computer is from 2010: It's still a decent computer, if on the lower performance end now. Notebook PCs, being Notebook PCs, generally don't have all-day battery life, are not always going to be instant-boot, and can sometimes run hot under the simplest of tasks in a poor-enough environment (Ask me how often that happens in the hot season where I live if the A/C goes out, I dare ya). Despite their drawbacks, they are, first and foremost, a full-blown PC in a portable package. They're easily docked, have a good port selection (generally), and can even be user-upgradeable or user-servicable... two big plusses for me over the Hybrid Tablet option. Plus, I can wipe the original OS off and replace it with whatever I feel like (generally Linux so it runs faster and is more secure). Any piece of software I could need (or want) will generally run on it and, even when I'm having to charge the battery every 2-4 hours, I can still get a respectable amount of work done on the go with one, despite the bulk I may incur by going with this route. Sadly, though, this opens the way for malware of all flavors, generally speaking (Again, my preference for using Linux mitigates this to a respectable degree), to infect the system if you're not careful. Hybrid Tablets can succumb to this as well, though it's MUCH harder. With the notebook, multitasking is easier acomplished out-of-box, and the useable area isn't so... claustrophobic. Plus, you can generally get notebooks more tailored to a specific task or category than you can with a Hybrid Tablet. Granted, getting online may be a tedious task, but is quickly alleviated with how commonplace smartphones with unlimited data plans are, as well as nearly every device released now including WiFi and Bluetooth as standard, so this isn't a problem today like it would have been five or ten years ago. Granted, it's still a mild inconvenience to have to manually connect to Verizon's network via my notebook's bluetooth after resuming from sleep mode, though I'm also working at a much more capable system than the Hybrid Tablet.
With physical media becoming more and more obsolete by the day, I don't feel the need to include the lack of an optical drive in either option, but I have found myself in quite a few situations where the lack of a CD/DVD drive is... rather infuriating. No matter, you can always pick one up at your local Walmart for a slight premium, but it works. I can vouch for this being a viable solution with the Notebook PC, especially if you dock it to a table or desk and you're trying to recreate a Desktop PC environment.
Another benefit of the Notebook PC before I finish this post is the general professionalism that comes along with using something more akin to what one would traditionally think of when they think of a computer, even with the slight bulk. You can run full office suites, get real photo editing software, even compile your own software, if you so desire.
The possibilities go much further than this blog post could ever give, so with that, I leave you with my analysis of using a Notebook PC for portable computing. In sort, it's more power on the go.
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