Microsoft Surface tablets

I agree as well. They have a really good shot at recapturing the market. Primary importance for them is not to make the mistake of making Windows RT too expensive to licence, and it could have a bright future in very many areas.

 

With all application purchases going through MS' app. store they have a great opportunity to subsidize WRT sales. They could price it very competitively, IMHO.

Cheers

 

They could, and I think they are, but if it isn't 'free' then the cheaper the phone, the bigger the 'problem'. So perhaps rather than just making it cheap, they should consider making it a percentage of the price of the tablet, with a low maximum?

 

I don't think tablet software sales are comparable to revenue on game consoles or the rest of the software market. When they launched the Mini, Apple said $6.5B total has been paid out to developers. Given how many years and devices we're talking about, that's very small. Console and PC games revenue are at $20B/yr each, and then there all the other software.

Yup, and you can really see this with how well Samsung was able to customize JB for the Galaxy Note II. The browser using hover to behave like mouseover is exactly the type of mouse substitution that I was talking about. My guess is that Google looked at the Fire - the only non-iPad tablet to get any significant share - and decided that the tried and true tactic of low price point is the safe way to go.

 

On second thoughts, actually a lot of people are using iPad with a pseudo stylus to take notes. Apple might not be holed that badly after all.

 

I really think that's just a compromise people are making due to no competition at first and no inductive option.

It makes a big difference in accuracy, visibility (capacitive styluses are fat), functionality (hover and buttons, the latter being very useful for erasing/undoing), and it's so much more comfortable to rest your palm on the surface like everyone does on paper. Finally, it's just annoying to have a stylus that doesn't slot into the tablet.

It's no contest. Anyone who tries a real stylus and has any intention of writing notes will shun capacitive options.

 

Yup, when I got my capacitive only slate over 2 years ago I thought using a capacitive pen would be at least somewhat useable. Unfortunately, that isn't the case at all. It's downright horrible compared to the active digitizer pen on my convertable tablet. With the active digitizer I have pixel perfect control and accuracy with the stylus. With a capacitive touch pen? Yeah, good luck hitting something within 10-20 pixels of where you actually want to touch. With some practice I imagine someone could get down to around 5-10 pixels as the margin of random error, but for me that is completely unuseable. And that doesn't even touch on the relative unresponsiveness of capacitive touch pens. Or the lack of buttons. Or the lack of hundreds of levels of pressure sensitivity. Or... The list goes on.

I know a few graphic designers and artists that have ended up getting Windows slates rather than pony up money for a far more expensive Cintiq. And they feel the accuracy and responsiveness are basically equal although they do lose a few features.

I think people "accept" the capacitive stylus for iPad just because they've never actually gotten to use a stylus that is even remotely good.

Regards,
SB

 

How big is the digitizer market? Big enough for MS to differentiate the Surface on?

Is the pen the main reason people buy the Note or Note II?

Seems like a niche market.

Sure back in the day, people used styli with their Palm Pilots. But the Tablet PC, which is the forerunner to the Surface, didn't really convert the world to stylus use.

 

Seems like if MS thought that pen input was going to be -that- big of a deal, it would have been in both RT and Pro, but the fact that it's in Pro seems to indicate that they believe it matters to some people. The comments on places like here and various Surface-related articles and posts seem to imply that they are right, to some degree.

 

I think there are people who like the idea of being able to draw free hand but it's a smaller number of people who actually do it regularly.

When I was a student, I doodled a lot while taking notes, so I guess it would be a plus. But if I were taking notes of a lecture, I'd rather type than write and then depend on handwriting recognition software.

Having the option to do either would be nice too.

Otherwise, I wonder how many students use laptops in their math classes. And of those, how many use a digitizer to write down equations.

 

Well the conjecture I'm making is that it will grow. I think there's enormous growth potential in schools. I certainly would have loved to have a $500 1.5lb slate during my undergrad for engineering and even highschool.

It's not just Surface, but rather all stylus-equipped Win8 tablets.

Older Tablet PCs were heavy, $1500+, came with bad displays, and had 4 hours battery life max. Atom based models improved some of those points, but were often too slow (single core, slow HDD) and didn't have very good software. Palm Pilots didn't have an inductive stylus, and had several shortcomings that prevented them from being a notepad replacement.

The time is right to start a quasi-paperless revolution for real this time. Apple is going to realize the same thing with their education push. I'm quite sure that they'll release a stylus equipped tablet within 18 months, because otherwise the iPad will have a glaring deficiency on that front compared to the competition. You can't learn effectively by just taking pictures of the blackboard/whiteboard, and you can't draw diagrams, equations, flowcharts, etc with a touch keyboard.

 

personal taste also, on the ipad my gf nearly always uses the pen, I always use my finger

 

Good practice. You never know when digit strength might come in handy. I find digit mobility is a great way of sorting out problems in the household which crop up from time to time and I guess your gf using the pen is also pretty good in this respect too.

 

I see what you did there.

 

hoho, I also have arthritis, but that doesnt play a part ATM.
the thing with a tablet, is I only use it if I quickly want to look up something on the couch etc, i.e. turn it on (0.5 second), press the google app and tell it what I want etc.
If Im gonna do something serious for 10+ mins I use a proper PC, nice keyboard & mouse etc

 

We'll see if drawing apps. become popular on the Surface Pro.

 

Plug in a keyboard and mouse and it IS a proper desktop. Only if you choose you can unplug the keyboard and mouse and voila, a tablet on the go.

It doesn't have to be. It's just one additional use case that makes great use of an accurate multifunction stylus. Something that you rarely ever see outside of Windows slates/tablets and Wacom (or similar) input surfaces.

Desktop publishing, CAD/CAM, scientific note taking, etc. are all other use cases. The beauty of a Windows slate/tablet is that it isn't reliant on a very narrow range of use cases (media consumption) to be relevant.

Regards,
SB

 

Btw related to the inputting math with a stylus discussion:
http://www.7tutorials.com/do-math-easy-way-math-input-panel

Seems there's a general tool you can use unrelated to OneNote too! And apparently it works with Mathematica and on the web (HTML5) as well, so that's pretty awesome

I'm guessing someone must have a MathML->LaTeX conversion utility as well, although I even saw some notes about being able to embed MathML in tex...

 

Are there no soft keyboards with math symbols?

Or apps which would let you insert math notation from an onscreen palette?

 

There are just too many math symbols to be useful on a keyboard.

There's the added disadvantage that math notation developed in an era of pen and paper only and is quite hostile to keyboard style input. Symbol based languages (like Chinese) have keyboards for them, but the organization of those languages is different enough that a widely usable math keyboard hasn't been invented yet. And I believe those languages have rules governing formation of symbols and what they mean. Math is also governed by logic but on a different plane. Maybe there's a market opportunity here

Too impractical, in my view. Out of the question for something like a lecture.