The laptop wins here, hands down. You enjoy the benefits of a large screen, plenty of ports to back up to media and to the cloud, and a solid keyboard to type on. You also have easy drag-and-drop functionality between open windows, plus more-powerful note taking, annotation, and word processing tools than tablets offer.

You could retrofit your tablet--by using an adapter or cable to connect the tablet to a large-screen LCD monitor, and by using an external Bluetooth or Wi-Fi keyboard and mouse (on Android) to navigate the screen--to approximate the laptop experience. But the resulting hodgepodge goes against the clean elegance of having a tablet to begin with. Some options, like the with its , come close to duplicating the netbook experience (the dock has a netbook-size keyboard, an extra battery, USB ports, and a touchpad for pointer navigation of the touchscreen); but most fall far short of that goal.

For writing a dissertation, you'll need office tools more robust than those available on either Apple's iOS or Google's Android platform; and you'll want a screen with a diagonal size larger than 10 inches to review your work on. You'll also want the full control and better ergonomics that a laptop keyboard and a mouse offer.

Reading Books

If you plan to buy ebooks for your next English Lit class, you'll find that reading them on a tablet is infinitely easier and more comfortable than reading them on a laptop. No contest.