Mobile vs. PC: The Battle of Online Casino Platforms
Playing online casino games is great fun, and there are so many ways to access amazing gambling experiences today.
Of course this creates a bit of a conundrum, as you could be torn over whether it makes sense to fire up your PC to enjoy a spot of online casino action, or to instead leverage your smartphone for web-based gambling on the go.
To settle this question once and for all, let’s compare the pros and cons of mobile and PC platforms in an online casino context.
The issue of convenience
With PC sales enjoying a resurgence, it seems that the naysayers who thought that smartphones, tablets and laptops would kill off desktop machines were more than a little wrong in their predictions.
Even so, there’s no getting away from the fact that today, if you have even a moderately modern handset, you can explore mobile casinos to the fullest whether you are curled up on the couch, enduring the morning commute, tucked up in bed or taking a break on a family holiday.
The unrestricted access to entertainment that smartphones afford is simply unmatched by PCs. Even laptops are significantly less convenient than truly portable devices when it comes to playing casino games.
For many people, this will be reason enough to stick with their smartphone when logging into their casino service of choice. But the battle is far from over.
The concerns of compatibility
The mobile market is somewhat fragmented, which causes compatibility issues not only depending on the operating system you favor, but also the particular hardware your handset is running.
While most modern casino operators will have applications for both Android and iOS, things get more complex when you factor in the various versions of each platform, coupled with the disparate array of chipsets, display sizes and resolutions that have to be taken into account.
Older handsets may be simply incapable of running these apps, or may be locked out artificially because the OS maker has discontinued support for them.
Newer handsets with fresh form factors, such as Samsung’s range of foldable phones, could struggle to display apps and games correctly because of issues like unusual screen aspect ratios, and so on.
For PC users, the vast majority of these concerns melt away. So long as you are running a Windows machine, or have a modern browser installed on a mainstream Linux distro, you can be virtually certain that whichever casino site you visit and whichever games you play, the experience will be solid.
Likewise if you have a PC that was released in the last decade or so, it should be up to the task of running an online casino.
There are some outliers, and of course if you don’t have at least Windows 10 installed then there are security risks to consider as well. However, the low barrier of entry from a hardware and a software perspective that PCs represent in this context should give them a fighting chance against the mobile onslaught.
The matter of multitasking
This is more of a question for serious gamblers, but one which deserves to be addressed nonetheless; if you play on mobile, you are realistically limited to only having one casino game open and running at once, if only because it is impractical to switch between them and keep up with the action.
Meanwhile on PC, having several browser windows open and running different games simultaneously is not too much to ask. And the mouse and keyboard interface also provides the precision and flexibility that makes this even more achievable.
This might sound like a fringe use case, but it’s worth pointing out that plenty of people who play poker professionally online are active in several games at once to maximize their winnings.
The best of both worlds
The final point to make is that comparing mobiles and PCs in an online gambling context is a bit of a false dichotomy, because very few people have to make a firm choice between one or the other platform. If you own a smartphone, then it is more than likely you also have some form of desktop PC available to you, and vice versa.
Online casino operators know this, and so recognize that players will probably switch from device to device according to where they are and what they are up to.
The solution, then, is to play on your desktop if you want a big-screen, consistent experience when gambling online, and move to your mobile if you need the convenience of portability.