ASUS Eee Pad Transformer 2

Yes I have and it's brilliant already, which makes it even more impressive swing as it's a developer preview to show of metro, rather than a final OS. I'm actually using it as my main OS, not dual boot, just my main OS and it's already incredibly stable and fast.

Have you watched the keynotes and understand what it can do? Once apps become available you will realise why it is so good.

I can't wait for true multitasking and split screen. Video and forum on the screen at the same time. Or what ever you want.

As for desktop on arm, it remians to be seen. There's rumors for both cases.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-desktop-apps-will-run-on-windows-8-on-arm/10756

Combine that with zune and you have by far the best Eco system.
When is android going to get a zune/iTunes equivalent up. They been talking about an equivalent since honeycomb was released but as far as I understand although they've released so far is music.
 
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The Kal-El is reportedly 30% more power efficient that tegra 2 per core, and will consume even less power thanks to its 500mhz companion core. So we should see better battery life than the current iteration (and from my own experience, thats already excellent)

The big question for me is when is it going to be released, and how much can I sell my current one for? :p



Dual boot to W8 would be quite nice as well possibly
 
AcidHell2 said:
Yes I have and it's brilliant already, which makes it even more impressive swing as it's a developer preview to show of metro, rather than a final OS. I'm actually using it as my main OS, not dual boot, just my main OS and it's already incredibly stable and fast.

Have you watched the keynotes and understand what it can do? Once apps become available you will realise why it is so good.

I can't wait for true multitasking and split screen. Video and forum on the screen at the same time. Or what ever you want.

As for desktop on arm, it remians to be seen. There's rumors for both cases.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-desktop-apps-will-run-on-windows-8-on-arm/10756

Combine that with zune and you have by far the best Eco system.
When is android going to get a zune/iTunes equivalent up. They been talking about an equivalent since honeycomb was released but as far as I understand although they've released so far is music.
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Yes, I've got a good understanding of what it is/what it will be able to do, It's quite closely related to my job so it makes sense to follow these things closely.

Zune I can understand, an ecosystem around as well evolved as iTunes, and far far ahead of what Android has is a good thing (assuming you're bothered about being legit I guess :p),

But the OS itself, why would you ever want video and forum/internet on the same screen, when the screen is tiny, hell I don't want that on a 26" 1920x1200 screen :p

'Snap' makes for nice video's, but thinking about it further I struggle to think of any situations where I'd want split screen over switching between apps, it would be rare, imo at least

imo, Windows 8 seems ok, certainly a better tablet OS than traditional windows would ever be, but I don't see anything special about it in terms of what it will be like to use.

Also worth noting that by the time Windows 8 is actually out we'll be talking about Android 4.5/5, whatever the 'J' version will be, and of course iOS 6 presumably. By that stage one of the main downsides to Honeycomb, namely the lack of apps, will be mostly sorted, but it will be a problem for Windows 8, much like the situation they find themselves in with WP7
 
You can't see why you would want a split screen. You saying you would never want to watch tv/film and have forum up.
Or play a game an have a website up,
There's plenty of space on a tablet.

I don't think android will catch up on apps. There is no security or hardware checks for apps. This is a major downside, when apps don't work or crash. The app producer is blamed. Rather than the fact android can be tweaked or installed on any old hardware. This is another major downside along with the lack of iTunes/zune equivalent and one amazon has massively solved if you lice in the us anyway.
On the other hand, the entire system around windows makes it stupidly easy to build aps as well as using those aps on desktops, tablets or whatever. I can see windows apps being far faster at catching up with iOS than android.

Android/iOS will already be working on those new OS and they will not be full OS they are way way behind, even with a year to go.
 
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Video + Forum - No, both require a decent width to use nicely.
Games + Website - Possible, if using the website as reference, and if you can get it to render nicely in the tiny width available.

Problem is the secondary screen really is tiny, limiting it's usage, it's roughly similar to a phone in portrait, and lets face it for most tasks you want the phone in landscape for the width...

One thing it could possibly be useful for would be chat apps, but then is that any better than having notifications when somebody writes something.

Most bad apps *are* due to bad coding frankly, but even then they're rare, in my experience most apps are fine. If this was really a big problem surely the WP7 market would be a whole heap bigger than it is? It's not simply because they were late to market.

Work won't be significantly fixed on the next versions of Android/iOS, certainly not to the extent that they can't add any features from W8 that they think are useful, there just aren't many to choose from :P
 
I totally disagree, you vastly underestimate what w8 has and can do.

I very much want to be able to watch a video and post on a web. You can do plenty of things in the space, once apps are capable of using the space.

W7 wasn't just late to Market, it also had a small user base. Which will change with w8. It's going to have a huge user base, far more than android or iOS.

And you also under estimate just how much work iOS and android have to do, to get anything resembling w8. there is a huge amount of work on underlying Apis which allow app makers huge resources and stupidly easy to program to use them.

Pod course split screen would be better than notification for chat, something that is there compared to bringing soothing up and switching between apps. Again if apps use the space correctly you can display a huge amount of info and it's far bigger than a phone screen.
 
User base is an interesting thing, W8 won't be massive (initially) on tablets obviously, but W8 overall will be bigger, which then leads to what apps will be developed and whether they're useful at all for tablets...

.net is a huge set of API's true, but it's no easier to program than Java for Android (easier than Objective-C I'll give you), It's also likely that it will be more limited than what you can do with Android if you so desire (although most apps shouldn't be going anywhere near that road). Basically they're certainly not going to be behind in this area but I don't see them being significantly better than what the other platforms provide.

Personally I think I'd rather have a notification system like Honeycomb or WebOS for a chat program, that's just personal preference...

But I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, otherwise the mods will have to rename the thread :p
 
It's massively easier to program for, visual studios does most of it and the new Apis handle a all the tricky stuff so all you have to do is reference the api.
 
Visual Studio isn't really significantly easier than Eclipse though, neither is C# any easier than Java, so to say it's "massively easier" is just wrong.

As for the API's, I've not inspected the W8 SDK in detail but the API's for Android are wide ranging and useful, I can't see W8 being any massively better in this respect, they might be a bit but nothing more, imo.
 
Most programers would disagree with you, not only is it superior and handles more work, the Apis take a massive work load of the programer.

Perhaps watch the programming keynotes and see what is handled in w8 and all you have to do is call it up. From file acasition from multiple sources including online to data sharing between apps. It is a massive step forward.
 
From watching the keynotes Windows 8 does look easier to program for than Android, however TBH Android isn't exactly difficult. If you're clever enough to develop something useful for Windows 8, then you're clever enough to develop something useful for Android.

Visual Studio is however much better than Eclipse. However it wouldn't be at all difficult for Google to develop their own IDE which would rival (or likely beat) Visual Studio (note i'm only talking about Metro development here, obviously if you include all the other stuff that Visual Studio can do then it's in a class of it's own). That said there is a huge gap between "not difficult to do" and "likely to happen" ;-)

Anyway, back on topic, the Transformer 2 looks awesome. Even if it's just a Transformer 1 with Tegra 2 swapped for Kal-el, I still want one.
 
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ng93 said:
Visual Studio is however much better than Eclipse. However it wouldn't be at all difficult for Google to develop their own IDE which would rival (or likely beat) Visual Studio (note i'm only talking about Metro development here, obviously if you include all the other stuff that Visual Studio can do then it's in a class of it's own). That said there is a huge gap between "not difficult to do" and "likely to happen" ;-)
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This. Is true, but wasn't really the point.
It's the ease, time factor, user base, power of the OS(like standard powerful ways. To interact. With each other), and the other development tolls onto of visual studios. As well as the certificate process for apps. That give a complete Eco system, that is far supior to android and why IMO app development will quickly surpass androids headway.
 
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AcidHell2 said:
This. Is true, but wasn't really the point.
It's the ease, time factor, user base, power of the OS(like standard powerful ways. To interact. With each other), and the other development tolls onto of visual studios. As well as the certificate process for apps. That give a complete Eco system, that is far supior to android and why IMO app development will quickly surpass androids headway.
Click to expand...

I realise it wasn't really the point you were making, but i'm just saying that a lot can happen in a year :). God knows what Android will be like by then.

Admitedly i'm not very clued up on the Windows Store certificate process, but I can't imagine it being that much simpler than Android. Although i'm sure it'll be simpler than iOS (hell, flying the space shuttle is probably easier than getting an app on Apple's App Store :p).

Also, going back to a point you made earlier about Windows 8's user base being very large. While this will no doubt be true, it's the size of the Metro user base that really maters. This will depend on whether desktop and laptop users adopt Metro as there primary interface. There's no way i'm making a prediction on whether this'll happen/how quickly, as ATM its a complete unknown :p

Although saying that, I personally don't really care whether a platform has 1 bazillion apps. As long as the basics are there, it's all good :)

p.s. it'll be interesting to see if third party development environments support Windows 8 ARM. With Unity3D and Flash among others allowing you to port games over many platforms (including Android), this would be a useful feature to getting games on Windows 8 ARM :)
 
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I'm really really looking forward to Windows 8 Tablets. I love the idea of tablets but without a full blown OS it cannot replace my netbook. The Transformer 2 sounds great, but how many windows apps are going to reappear for ARM? Not many I bet.
 
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