Surface PRO pricing revealed !

Have they released pricing information yet? I suppose I should just head over to their site to see.

[edit] Cool. Damn, the screen is smaller than I was thinking it was. I was hoping for at least 11". Still the X15 Pro is potentially very interesting depending on battery life. If it's too short I'm sure they'll eventually update to Haswell when it comes out. Now if only I knew how much they were planning to charge for the optional keyboard dock.

Regards,
SB

 

Options pricing is available at Dynamism.com now. $200 for the keyboard, which includes a battery.

 

Cool, a bit higher than I was hoping but not bad considering the Asus TF810c dock is 175-ish USD. Now, I'll just have to wait and see what user reviews are like for it. I'm especially keen to find out how battery life plays out.

Nice they include pricing for the easily swappable battery as well as battery charger.

So about ~1500 USD for the Pro version, dock, extra battery, and battery charger. I'll have to think about this one. Being able to swap the battery is a nice option if the battery life isn't much more than 4-5 hours for slate alone.

So very tempting.

Regards,
SB

 

Yeah with the battery in the keyboard, I think it's not too unreasonable. I'm still keeping an eye out for contenders until it's finally released but I don't think there will be. Especially the 16:10 screen.

 

Why are there no 3:2 (15:10) screens? Only Google's Chromebook has a 3:2 screen. I have an iPad and I've never used a 16:10 or 16:9 tablet, but as I usually use my iPad in portrait mode I fear that even 16:10 would be too widescreen for me.

 

As you I mostly use my tablet in portrait mode. I have tried a Surface RT and I can definitely say 16:9 is not for me.

 

I'd love it if someone would release a 4:3 display for a Win8 slate. But I'm not holding my breath that it'll happen. So 16:10 is probably the best I'll be able to get. It's still too narrow when in portrait mode, but better than 16:9.

Regards,
SB

 

I'd love more 16:10 and 3:2 options myself personally. 3:2 would be perfect for a tablet IMO. 16:10 perfect for more multimedia orientated but still varied uses. From friends who work in IT/electronics retail - apparently a largely complained about issue is "those black bars". People want media to fill their screen. In the future with OLED, perhaps the bars won't be quite as jarring, at least.

 

Speaking of pricing, no fire sales on any W8 tablets so they must be selling okay?

 

So what are the real alternatives to the Surface Pro? By that, I mean:
- can be used as a pure tablet (<1 kg without keyboard)
- stylus input
- 1080p or higher resolution
- i3 or faster, 4 GiB RAM, true SSD
- Windows 8

I'm aware of:
Kupa X15
Lenovo ThinkPad Helix
Samsung Ativ SmartPC Pro

Acer Iconia W700 lacks stylus support.
Sony Vaio Duo 11 is heavier (convertible)
Dell XPS 12 is heavier (convertible) and lacks stylus support.
Both Asus VivoTab and HP ElitePad use Atom and have lower resolution.

 

Samsung ATIV I've discounted due to major issues with the keyboard dock.

I like that Lenovo ThinkPad, looks like a good design. High quality feature set, most likely quite expensive even at base model.

So for i3+, FullHD display and stylus support, there's really not many (good) alternatives. Most alternatives use Atom processor which is not an option for me honestly.

 

The upcoming Asus Transformer Book will be available with a Core i5 or i7 with a 13" screen. It's more of an ultrabook that can also be used as a slate. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it'll support pen input or not.

One of the nice features for it, however is that the keyboard dock not only has another battery but it also has a 500 GB HDD. The slate portion has a 128 GB SSD.

I'm also going to guess battery life is going to be on a low side with an i5/i7 and 13" screen.

The Lenovo Helix is pretty interesting with the reversible screen. Looks like it'll be ~1500 USD.

So far, the Kupa X15 still looks to be the design to beat. Although the Lenovo and Asus entries appear to be thinner.

And as Malo said, Samsung completely dropped the ball on the keyboard dock and to a lesser extent on the stylus (no eraser nub functionality from what I've read).

Regards,
SB

 

I looked at the iconic a w700 yesterday decent machine. I would of brought it if it was a laptop.
But its some sort of machine you've gotta assemble. All review sites I looked at said this aspect was a joke. Yes I know everyone wants to be apple. Tablets. But now I see all this dumb gimmicks that raise the machines price and lessen its strength. Eg rotating screens.twisting screens. Surely the masses don't fall for these gimmicks. Wait

 

Yeah the Acer W700 would have been a decent slate if it had a keyboard dock with battery. Unfortunately they decided that instead of giving it the ability to become a notebook, they instead gave it a monitor stand and BT keyboard. Wrong decision.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm glad manufacturers try different things. I just wish that they could come up with a standard dock connector, at least within their own product lines. So they could offer a set of accessories that work with all tablets, including next-gen.

 

true to an extent but their method is just dumb, you can be different and put the wheels on the cars roof, but that car wont go anywhere, i.e. sometimes the existing standards are the best way and just being differnt for the sake of being different is not a wise choice (for the consumer)
anyways I couldnt really find anything I wanted, so brought the cheapest laptop (small and surprsingly good keyboard except for the shockingly bad arrow keys, they take up the same space as the right shift key, a better design would be to make the rightshift key normal square sized, now its this massize 3x1 sized key its nearly the size of a spacebar on some pcs! and put the arrow keys in that space wasd layout with pgup/down as halfsized keys).
my cellphone is now officially ~20% faster than my laptop (and my laptop has a fan etc) just shows how good ARM is.
I wish I could use my cellphone as my pc.
A. decent keyboard (simple)
B. screen (well it can transmit screen wireless so possible, ipad resolution yum)
C. OS (must be possible to install a linux variety on it)

if I was a true geek I'ld look into something that does this

 

In what way?

 

Asus has an Android phone that can "dock" into a tablet sized screen to become a tablet. Not sure if you can root it and put Linux on it though.

http://www.asus.com/Tablets_Mobile/PadFone/

I think in a couple years, maybe less, we'll see a Windows version of that. Asus have already stated that they have approached Microsoft about making a custom version of Windows for uses in a PadFone.

Regards,
SB

 

This don't look good at all...

Ouch. Is there anyway Microsoft can salvage this?

Tommy McClain

 

Ditch RT, give up on trying to make Apple like margins on Pro and make an alliance with Intel to make a viable low power x86 tablet.

Everyone wants Apple like margins and it's not happening ... they rode a wave of hype from the iPod but even for them it's simply going to stop sooner or later, Android and Google are already starting to make a dent in it.

As long as Microsoft tries to out-Apple Apple all they will do is fail.