Microsoft Surface tablets

only caught 2 of the pages so its not the full review.

The new new ipad might be faster but it hardly matters because you still can't do side by side apps on it.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaTWm9IZjjs&feature=plcp


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuYnhXDFHWM&feature=plcp

hands on the surface from the shanghi event

 

I think this calls for one of these:

1 - Learn Mandarin
2 - Watch video
3 - ...
4 - PROFIT!

 

How do you function knowing your iPad is only half the speed of a future product? you must be devastated.

 

How do you function knowing that in 6 months your new new ipad will only be half the speed of the new new new ipad ?

 

If he or anyone would want to re-sell his i-pad, he won't have a particularly hard time and will still get a quite fair amount for it. That is of course if anyone is such a die hard fanatic that thinks he needs a new tablet every few months.

Apart from that the sarcasm above is completely unnecessary. Apple or Microsoft or anyone else will still sell their products within their own true projections (give or take) whether cheap shots get fired from each side in fora from users or not.

Personally I still can't find much use for any kind of tablet as long as there are laptops around which are times faster, with times more functionalities and better typing ergonomics amongst others and on top of that partially at even better prices. I'd love to hear for a change what real benefits any tablet would give me over a 500-600 bucks laptop, apart that it's smaller and lighter. Don't know about anyone else but my back isn't going to break over those few pounds weight difference while moving it around nor will my knees get injured if I place it on them. To each his own I guess, but to me if it's going to be a windows experience I have much higher demands for my money than some Tegra3 or A5X/6X or whatever else SoC. Even 2 years old laptops are more effiecient than those.

 

Many people will sacrifice performance for ergonomics. 10 years ago very few people even used laptops because they didn't afford enough performance. If the device is fast enough for what you're using it for, a 2x performance boost isn't that big of an issue. It's not true of everyone, but the majority of PC/tablet owners need little performance.

 

Try using a laptop as a cookbook in the kitchen.

Not joking actually: it's one of the daily uses of one of ours. Same thing for bathroom usage (clunky with a laptop), bedtime reading (us), bedtime cartoons (kid), car entertainment (kid), economy airplane seats, etc.

My 15" laptop and iPad are both stashed under the bed and get about 50/50% usage. Just depends on what you're doing. Somehow, for web stuff, I don't feel the iPad 3 is considerably slower than the quad code i5 of the laptop, so the speed argument doesn't bother me there. That's even more so for web stuff with dedicated apps (e.g. dedicated forum reading apps, RSS feeds, etc. which accounts for 80% of my web consumption anyway.)

 

A tablet will be less trouble to give to your parents than a $500 laptop -- probably less support needed.

I have a laptop but it sits on the desk while it's the iPad that I take over the rest of the house or sometimes take to go.

There's also a lot more interesting software development for mobile devices than desktop platforms these days. Certainly there are a lot of things you can't do on a tablet because there's no equivalent to monolithic software like Photoshop.

But on the other hand, mobile apps. use location services better.

 

first impressions of the screen

Ars' look at Surface RT (by Peter Bright of the "consistently better" quote):

Tech Report's first look at the Asus VivoTab RT:

Apologies for the long quotes, but I wanted to provide full context.

Anyone find it funny that tablet screen talk is starting to sound like digicam talk (better pixels are preferable to more pixels)? After the move to IPS, I guess fewer layers is the next improvement. I wonder if Surface's 1st-gen resolution is partly a result of insufficient available supply of high-res ~10" screens. With all this talk of Apple gobbling up supply, it's got to show up somewhere, right?

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6385/microsoft-surface-review/10

Apparently just typing in Microsoft Word already maxes out a single core with fast typing pushing the Tegra 3 to 50% utilization. As Anand comments it's more an indictment of Office, but you don't end up having as many spare CPU cycles on the Surface as you would think or hope.

If Office CPU usage is so bad, I wonder if anyone's run battery tests while typing an essay? After-all, if the Surface's big advantage is the productivity use case, does the battery hold up as well in productivity compared to consumption scenarios?

 

Hope you clean that after the potty trips

 

Am I speaking in Swahili? When did I say that? I said it has long been the most important, and that's absolutely true. Name one top ranked TV in the last 15 years that didn't also sit among those with the best contrast. You can't, because no other factor (color gamut, brightness, etc) could make up for that. That's why LCD projection was never rated as well as DLP or LCOS, and why LCD flat panel hasn't been rated as well as plasma or direct view CRT.

I then gave an example as applied to cell phones. Who puts value in the difference between 720p and 1080p on a cell phone unless it's right up to your face? Earlier in this thread RudeCurve was telling me that 1080p on a 10.6" has no advantage over a 768p screen for getting work done, and that's on 4x the area or more vs cell phones. Then you got some manufacturers offering higher resolution panels as an option in their notebooks, but not many customerse are choosing them, hence the prevalence of 1366x768. Clearly we're approaching a point of diminished returns.

Jubei was talking like contrast doesn't matter at all, and resolution (along with cleartype) is the only relevant factor. He then took exception to my statement that contrast can make a Lumia 900 display look better than a iPhone4 display, saying nobody credible would agree.

 

I could have left that detail out in an effort to avoid TMI, but let's be honest: everybody does it.

 

http://www.wired.com/reviews/2012/10/microsoft-surface/all/

Another double blind test.

 

Whoever greenlit this crap after the resolution of the iPad3 was known is insane ... if they didn't want to put it on the market below iPad3 pricing for marketing reasons they should have just put everything they had up to that point in a landfill.

Apple couldn't buy better publicity ...

Tablets are media consumption devices, as long as it can display websites and video smoothly everything after the screen is secondary ... very much including the OS.

 

Yep, has replaced the magazine a long time ago for me.

Tommy McClain

 

Yes, it is a twist of terminology. [nitpicking]Which is why I called it de facto supersampling. Not de jure. [/nitpicking]

 

there were apparently updates to both the os and office that fixes some performance issues. One of the reviews out there mentions that office is only a preview and not final shipping software . So i guess depending on when the reviews are done could determine performance issues.

 

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/microsofts-first-stab-at-a-pc-surface-reviewed/

prob one of the better reviews out there right now. The verge and gizmodo were down right idiotic .