*** The Official Microsoft Surface Thread ***

I'm actually quite excited about it - finally a tablet that ought to run smoothly AND be can be used for more productive purposes (something that in my opinion, no current tablet achieves). The option to use what will hopefully be a well integrated (optional) keyboard is a huge plus for me as I hate using wireless hardware, never feels as responsive.

I think I know what I'll be treating myself to this Christmas! Saying that though, where do we think they're going to be physically showcasing it? As I will definitely want to try before I part with £800. Obviously Apple have their own stores to use, MS will use electrical stores I presume?

As a bit of an aside, I also want to echo what NathanE said about the entire industry shifting - it will be all about mobile devices, docking stations and thin clients soon. A lot of companies are already adopting the approach as it promotes mobile working, ease of moving desks and makes the task of visiting customer sites to make presentations, demos etc far less arduous (to name just a few examples). So, where you like it or not, desktops are on the way out, get used to the idea :p
 
Tute said:
Didn't take long for it to turn into an Apple bashing thread eh? Come on guys, the weight limit for that bandwagon was exceeded long ago.
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There are just as many people in this thread "bashing" Android and this device so not sure where you're coming from really...

I know I've said this before but the idea of just docking your tablet and being able to do proper things on it with a big display and mouse is excellent. I have a feeling however that the x86 version won't be quite there... I doubt it will have any more than 4GB of RAM (fine for most but more touch and go for photo processing etc, which is what it's aimed at) and there doesn't look like there will be a proper dock. By proper dock I mean one that you can just sit your tablet on and be able to use your screen, mouse/keyboard and external graphics attached to the dock. It looks like it will be another one of those things with half a dozen wires having to be attached and unattached each time you take it away unfortunately.
 
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Well I just thought that after the whole "OMG iPhones automatically put "Sent from my iPhone on the end of emails, i'd better bash the whole demographic" thread, Stockhausen's "Apple suckers" thread, and the contents of this thread from just four posts in that we might be able to discuss the product in question.

I'm also surprised at some people who I thought were quite mature posters engaging in it as well, will have to remember to take all their posts with a pinch of salt in future.
 
Tute said:
Well I just thought that after the whole "OMG iPhones automatically put "Sent from my iPhone on the end of emails, i'd better bash the whole demographic" thread, Stockhausen's "Apple suckers" thread, and the contents of this thread from just four posts in that we might be able to discuss the product in question.

I'm also surprised at some people who I thought were quite mature posters engaging in it as well, will have to remember to take all their posts with a pinch of salt in future.
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KNiVES post read like personal opinion RELEVANT to the thread topic. On the other hand posting in the Apple forums with posts like that, but discussing Android and Windows, are a regular occurrence and get similar responses. At least it is relevant to this thread (discussing competitors) rather than the threads you mentioned.
 
I'm surprised that I'm marginally interested, don't get me wrong that is heavy praise.

I look at tablets now and think, a device for morons who don't have enough devices yet. I can't stand using anything but the phone function on my phone, reading tiny pages of internet, playing games might be a nice waste of time on trains/travel/bog but its still a tiny irksome screen and hunching up over it.

Tablets are equally as stupid, limited usefulness, can't type quickly/easily and definitely without it being in the way, can't watch films and things easily without it always being awkward to position the screen, etc, etc.

This actually makes a device that is truly multipurpose, I want to take it out one time without the keyboard and use a screen keyboard, fine, I'm not LIMITED to that all the time though.

I hate the idea of one device for every conceivable situation, phone for when a tablet isn't great, tablet for when a laptop won't work, etc, etc. One device that can offer real usability in almost every situation I need one and you have a worthwhile device.


Just want them to make a 30% bigger one, it won't fit in my pocket anyway so why does it need to be tiny, I'm not a 7yr old girl, being over 2lbs isn't going to cause my arms to fall off ;)
 
Amp34 said:
KNiVES post read like personal opinion RELEVANT to the thread topic. On the other hand posting in the Apple forums with posts like that, but discussing Android and Windows, are a regular occurrence and get similar responses. At least it is relevant to this thread (discussing competitors) rather than the threads you mentioned.
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I've got no problems with discussing competitors. There's just a line between discussing something and posting something designed to encourage flaming and then hiding behind the "oh, but it's my opinion" rubbish. Generally you can tell because the people that post such things don't bother to back it up at all.
 
Tempted in one of these or the new transformer pad infinity but I was really hoping the infinity would have windows 8 (but thats not out till the end of the year apparently)

KaHn
 
G-MAN2004 said:
Why's that?
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Because there's so many of them. Different versions, editions, vendor-specific releases. It's a constant moving target for application vendors. I recall reading that Tweetdeck used to have over 250 different compilations of their Android app simply because that's how many it needed to support the vast majority of Android devices in the wild.

iOS has it's own set of problems from a developer's perspective also. For instance needing a Mac to even get started on development, being forced to use Objective-C and the other lacklustre Apple tooling like "XCode".

Windows 8 tablets have none of these problems. There will be one SDK/API with a structured versioning story. The backward compatibility story has been incredibly well fleshed out from day one. Developers can use anything from HTML/CSS/JS, to C++, to C#, to VB.NET to create their applications.

The big problem that Apple has is that currently most companies (short of the Twitters and Facebooks of the world) have to outsource their development of their iOS apps to a very very expensive consultancy or contractor. This is mainly because hardly anyone knows Objective-C nor has any inclination to learn such a proprietary niche language. iOS development is so hot right now that many of these charge upwards of £1000 per day. Microsoft's solution is that a company can still re-purpose their existing developers to write their W8 Metro apps. There is no massive sea change to undertake. This is very important to Microsoft because it immediately gives them a competitive advantage on costs and should allow rapid growth of their AppStore. I fully expect that the Windows AppStore will grow at a rate several magnitudes higher than what iOS has ever experienced.
 
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I must admit, this looks like an excellent product, i've been disappointed with all windows tablets but they may well have cracked it.

Hopefully now people won't get stupid ideas of using ipads for business and productivity, such a poor OS on that front.
 
NathanE said:
Windows 8 tablets have none of these problems. There will be one SDK/API with a structured versioning story.
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I seem to remember consoles suffering the same issue. Good point.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet, but if I was in IT and somebody wanted an iPad then I'd probably try to fob them off because there isn't really an easy way to integrate anything from Apple.
If however they wanted a Windows Surface I'd be thinking, that's going to fit right into an AD setup, it will have real Office compatibility and it's going to have no problems using any other network resources - it's a no brainier from an IT position.

I will probably still use an iPad for home because I don't need a keyboard, but for a business I'd happily have Surface by the truckload.

Things like this may not be perfect desktop replacements but chances are you will always have it with you, and therefore if you have a spare ten minutes then you could get something done. No way would I bother booting a NetBook just for a few minutes work.
 
bitslice said:
I seem to remember consoles suffering the same issue. Good point.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet, but if I was in IT and somebody wanted an iPad then I'd probably try to fob them off because there isn't really an easy way to integrate anything from Apple.
If however they wanted a Windows Surface I'd be thinking, that's going to fit right into an AD setup, it will have real Office compatibility and it's going to have no problems using any other network resources - it's a no brainier from an IT position.

I will probably still use an iPad for home because I don't need a keyboard, but for a business I'd happily have Surface by the truckload.

Things like this may not be perfect desktop replacements but chances are you will always have it with you, and therefore if you have a spare ten minutes then you could get something done. No way would I bother booting a NetBook just for a few minutes work.
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I hope the RT will be able to join Windows domains etc, it makes managing them so much easier.
 
Uhtred said:
I hope the RT will be able to join Windows domains etc, it makes managing them so much easier.
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They sort of can. But honestly, no. And it will become clearer to sysadmins soon as to why you don't want to a load of roaming tablets to be joined to your domain. Security. Microsoft has some solutions in the works that will provide sysadmins with the controls they need, but outside the traditional scope of the domain.
 
Wasn't there a kludge so that people could log onto home and AD networks but somehow remain separate?
I'm guessing you are under a NDA here, if so ignore :)
 
Terrible presentation, rushed and with hardware that crashed. Not the best start. Also MS have just managed to step on their hardware partners toes. However the worst bit is going to be explaining to users that you cannot run <insert legacy x86 application here> on the RT model. That could be a PR disaster.

Personally I think the Surface will tank. However hopefully it does well enough to push Google and Apple to innovate in the tablet space.
 
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cu3ed said:
What Apps wont run on RT?...my understanding is that essentially ALL apps are made to run on RT, that also allows them to run on Win8 Full.
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Any x86 application won't run on Windows 8 RT as it runs on Arm. Try explaining to Joe Average that his shiny new RT Tablet cannot run his collection of legacy software.

Metro apps will, of course, run on both RT and x86 Windows 8.
 
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