You operate the Shield-399 two ways: via the touchscreen built directly into the unit or via the network dashboard through a locally connected computer, tablet, or phone. A touchscreen is great when you're at the device plugging in drives; it's fast and accessible. For greater capability and information, the network dashboard is going to give you more options. It's also nice to be able to check on the system status from across the room without having to hover over the unit directly. They both control the same device and the same queue. Same accounts too. There's no separate touchscreen state and web state.
In practice that means a job you queue at the touchscreen shows up in the browser with the same status and progress. A drive you connect appears on both in real time. Sign in on one interface and the others know about it. Log out and that session is gone everywhere.
The touchscreen is for the bench. Connect an evidence drive, watch it get classified and protected, pick a tool, add it to the queue, watch it run. The quick actions on the Home screen cover the common jobs without opening a full config dialog.
The network dashboard is for the rest of it. It's served by the device itself, and you can pair directly to it or access it from your local network. It's the more feature-rich interface: complete configuration for every tool, case management, evidence browsing, the analysis workspace, reports, user and organization admin. If you're doing more detailed work, you'll likely end up in the browser.
One detail I was stubborn about is the accuracy of radio, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth notifications. For anything hardware-level, like Wi-Fi or the device's hotspot, the touchscreen shows the device's confirmed state, not what you just asked it to do. If you toggle a radio, the icon reflects reality once the hardware actually reports it back.
It's definitely more work to integrate the two interfaces, but from a usability perspective it allows the platform to integrate into your working environment at a more accessible level (the software release, when it comes, is dashboard-first). Start a job in one place and track it from another. And watching a job you queued from your phone tick along on the device's screen across the room never gets old.