Microsoft Surface tablets

Totally silly question - it all depends on the size of the screen, and that's the whole point here. Also all the "PPI" talk is heavily dependent on viewing distances, but people like to leave that out or assume it's similar (sometimes valid, sometimes not).

Making an point by scaling one of the metrics to the extreme is a great example of a logical fallacy. I'm just disappointed he didn't go right down to single-pixel displays... or would that have made the problem too obvious? It was a cute joke, but it has no bearing on this discussion. A similarly absurd point regarding contrast would be "so why aren't all you guys just buying a big piece of black poster-board to hang on your wall as your TV? It has amazingly fine resolution (indistinguishable at any viewing distance), it just lacks contrast."

Anyways, his point was that relative to standard resolutions and viewing distances these days ("HD"ish), contrast is a more important determining factor of visual acuity than raw resolution. Certainly it will depend on the device form factor and I agree that you can't take a conclusion about HDTVs and transplant it to phones, but the original point made my Microsoft stands: contrast and resolution *together* determine visual acuity; you can't dismiss one out of hand as "good enough" and then drool over the other.

 

Sure. But an iPad 3 already has not just a good but an excellent contrast ratio. Not AMOLED contrast fantastic, but among the top performers of anything LCD out there.

Color me skeptical that you can compensate the dramatic loss in resolution of the Surface RT with some contrast or some other magic screen property.

 

BTW: I meant apples to apples hypothetical iPad 3 with 10x7 AMOLED vs the actual double resolution version, but I could have been a bit more specific on that.

 

Will be interesting to see if MS advertises the advantages they're claiming about the screen.

Obviously Apple made the Retina display the center of their ad campaign.

 

Sure, I'm not saying it can. The only point is that you can't consider just resolution in isolation and thus determine - a priori - that it will be worse. It probably will, but it remains to be seen and likely will depend a lot on the viewing environment.

 

Because there was nothing else good about the 3rd gen ipad over the second. Yes it had a faster cpu/gpu but a very small minority cares about that .

its the same with the iphone 4s . No one would have cared about it without siri and now with the iphone 5 its all about some insane thumb math .

MS has other things they can advertise about the surface that many don't know about. Office RT , Modern UI , this new fangled thing called usb ...

 

Contrast ratio as measured, i.e. without ambient light, is important if you want to use the screen in the dark. I'd say that's pretty important for TVs and gaming monitors. For use in well-lit environments you have to take reflected light into account. To me that's the more common case for tablets and phones.

 

Office RT I hear isn't really designed for touch? It has to load the desktop and then can you easily select various cells in Excel and so on?

I mean it could be done but it probably screams for a mouse?

ETA, lets see if they show Office RT in any TV ads. In the Best Buy ads this past Sunday, they're featuring all these devices showing the colorful grid so that may be more of what they emphasize.

 

Speaking of Microsoft ClearType: Inventor Bill Hill dies of heart attack: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/19/rip-microsoft-cleartype-inventor-bill-hill/

 

Of course isn't it free; but when you have only 1 or 2 TMU tops in a lower end mobile GPU, don't tell me that no loops whatsoever will be necessary. You'll get more "meaningful" AF performance with quad TMUs.

As for the "free" thing, today's desktop GPUs have fillrate to spare; AF doesn't consume any worthwhile bandwidth nor memory footprint last time I checked in contrast to anti-aliasing. The performance drop in those cases is so small that's it's fairly nonsensical to switch off AF even on the most humble 64bit desktop GPU.

Since when does a simple higher resolution equal to supersampling? The way I understand things for small form factor GPUs is in the paragraph above and yes I'd love to stand corrected. It's not a problem of the GPU itself, but rather the die area and in indirect extension power thresholds for those GPUs. Adreno320 as well as upcoming ARM T6xx GPUs have 4 clusters in their first high end iterations. There's one and only TMU per cluster and the lower end Adreno305 is exactly that: a single cluster GPU with 1 TMU.

Unless I'm missing something or am dead wrong in the first paragraph above, one solution would be to equip each cluster with a quad TMU and have for high end iterations in total 16 TMUs. I wouldn't want to know how HUGE those GPUs would end up to be in the end.

 

Multiple good improvements aren't necessary, when one thing trumps everything else, right?

I'm with you on the iPhone 4 to 4s. Or even 4s to 5. But for those on a 2 year schedule, 3GS to 4S or 4 to 5 is quite the jump in capabilities.

I've said before that I don't directly see must have for phones after this. And I've yet to see anybody make a case for a killer mainstream feature that's currently not in high-end phone.

Who knows. None of those are the kind of things normal people get all excited about. I think they'll have their hands full explaining to upset people (and their own reps) why their Surface RT can't run exiting x86 software.

 

Higher resolution (2x in each direction) is de facto super sampling.

 

No in the given case it's a twist of terminology since there's no up-/downsampling going on when everything (or at least the widest majority) is displayed at the native resolution of the display.

 

When one is resolutionary and the others are just processor upgrades the others take a back seat no ? I don't see people rushing to buy millions of pcs because intel bumped clock speeds a bit.

If you say so , apple agrees with me which is why retina got played up in the iphone 4 , seri in the 4s and thumb ratio's in the 5. Never once saw ads detailling the cpu/gpu improvements.

Thats because no one actually cares about that.

1) Wireless charging . When done properly this will be a big must have feature. 2) Proper pen input. With high end phones hovering between 4.5 and 5.5 inches proper pen input is a must

I'd also say better use of NFC . I have a few friends with the galaxy 3s who have those nfc stickers set up in diffrent area's of the house or in their car and it will change the settings for the phone. So when they are in the car and put the phone down on its sticky mat it reads the sticker and switches on bluetooth and pairs it with their stero system . Its pretty cool but has to be supported more.

Why do alot of people complain about the ipad not running osx software ?

Regardless , my point was that MS has alot of other things it can advertise . IOS has been around since 2007 and its very long in the tooth and so apple really has only one new hardware / software feature a year that they can push.

 

I don't follow ads in general to be honest, but if they ever referred to in an adverstisement to the 2048*1536 resolution in iPad3, higher resolutions have the idiotic tendency to require much higher fillrates. Since the GPU cores Apple is using can scale easily with multiple cores the most reasonable way to deliver a higher fillrate is to scale GPU core amounts; the other alternative would be to use the same amount of GPU cores as the past generation and scale frequencies yet it would come with a times higher power consumption cost.

As for the rest of your debate I've no idea why it always has to be Microsoft against Apple. At the very least Microsoft isn't going to compete only with Apple/iOS, but also with the crop of Android based devices.

silent_guy,

I tend to disagree. There's a LOT than can be done in terms of functionalities for smartphones and tablets for the future. For smart-phones while it's true that the display mediums f.e. won't scale beyond 1080p easily, there's always connectivity to other devices that will drive increasing performance scaling and it's probably the large variety of 3rd device connectivity opportunities that could drive innovation forwards.

Obviously for any of that kind of innovation to move forward any sort of 3rd party devices you'd connect to in theory would have to advance simultaneously. Things will change, but it'll take its time.

Speaking of connectivity (even in the rather vague sense as above) I don't see any docking stations f.e. in the hospitality branch for other than i-devices. Must be another of those awkward marketing only driven decisions I guess.

 

Nobody cares about wireless charging unless it's in all phones and its put in every hotel room, restaurant, airport, etc.

As has been discussed it charges slower so you have a lot of people plugging in at airports. If they didn't have to carry chargers, that would be great, until they find out it recharges a fraction of what the cord does in the same amount of time. People often have one or two hour layovers so every minute counts.

 

PCMag apparently posted and quickly took down a review of Surface RT, but not before it was cached by Google.

One interesting tidbit: The video port on RT appears to be standard mini-HDMI.

 

small minded there.

I'd like not to have to fumble for wires in my car and just be able to get in and put it on my dash and have it start charging. Combine it with nfc and then not only do i just have to lay my phone on the dash but it will also automaticly turn on bluetooth and swith around any settings I want with out me doing a thing.


I'd also like to come home and instead of having a mess of wires by my night stand to charge my tablet and phone and other devices I just simply place them on my night stand and they start charging .


The majority of people will leave their phones on their charger when sleeping. Thats a good 8 hours that will greatly harm their battery every night due to a full charge taking less than 4 hours. So wireles charging would work well there.

I'd like to have it on my coffee table also. Have a bunch of friends over watching the superbowl and everyone can simply put their phones down on the table and they all get a charge.


I can see where you'd simply want to pay $30 bucks for another cable that apple will make obsolete in a few years. You also seem to only recharge in airports so I can see where only getting x% of a charge is a bad thing for you. But I don't live in an airport constantly flying with only a few hours between when I do.

Also wireless charging doesn't have to be slow. My touch pad charges from a wire in 4-5 hours and on the dock in 5-6 hours a diffrence but not a fraction

 

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8160838/Surface review 1.pdf

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8160838/Surface review 2.pdf

 

They didnt say anything about portrait mode?

ouch theres blood on the floor, the ipad 4 is 2x the new ipad's (ipad3) speed so this means the surface is prolly ~45% of the ipads4 speed.