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Microsoft Surface
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer launched Windows 8 and the company’s new Surface tablet today in advance of the holiday season. They will begin selling at midnight tonight online and in the company’s new popup stores around the country tomorrow.
The new touch-screen on Windows 8 looks very Apple-esque. There are still many applications that will only work on Windows machines, so as someone who has wanted to throw my Windows laptop through the wall on numerous occasions, the new touch screen may work better.
But it will require investment in new hardware in order to be able to enjoy full functionality of Windows 8. “Broadly, anyone using Windows 8 on a touchscreen device loves it, while those using a keyboard and mouse tend to be of mixed minds” says Joel Johnson.
The new Surface tablet will run on Windows RT, a spin-off of Windows 8 for ARM-based processors (in this case 1.3-GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU). RT will not be able to run Windows “legacy” apps, but it does come preloaded with Office 2013 Home and Student, which includes fully functional versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note.
Microsoft pop-up stores open tomorrow
The Surface is pricey, with the same $499 base price as the new iPad 4 with Retina Display (which comes with 16GB of memory vs. the 32GB for the Surface). The new keyboard attachments will cost between $119 (for the flat Touch) to $130 (for Type with actual keys). A new version that runs on Windows 8 pro will be released in January.
The Surface will start selling at midnight tonight, and Microsoft is set to open 32 holiday “popup stores” starting tomorrow — 29 of which are located in the same malls as Apple stores, so let the steel cage death match begin.
The big thing that makes the Surface intriguing is the keypad, and there’s no question that it is the defining design feature. It’s almost impossible to blog with an iPad touch screen, and I hated the awkward Apple keyboard attachment so much I gave it to Dan Ellsberg. If this keyboard really did make it possible to have a keyboard readily available that would allow me to dispense with lugging a bulky laptop around, the price might be worth it.
The reviews of the keyboard range from awkward to superlative:
- NYT: [The Touch is] an incredibly slick idea, but the keys don’t move. You’re pounding a flat surface. If you type too fast, the keyboard skips letters….Fortunately, Microsoft also offers the Type Cover ($130), with real keys that really travel. At 0.24 inches thick, it’s not as unnoticeable as the Touch Cover, but Microsoft says it’s the thinnest moving-keys keyboard on earth, and it types nicely.
- CNET: The Touch Cover is an incredibly useful and capable accessory that feels as essential to the Surface experience as its kickstand, but given the choice, I’d recommend most buyers spring for the $130 Type Cover keyboard instead. It’s all the best things about the Touch Cover but with very comfortable, wide, depressible keys. It is a bit thicker than the Touch Cover, but not by much. If you’re looking to leverage the Surface’s capability as a productivity machine, you’ll definitely want to spring for one of these cover keyboards.
- NBC: Microsoft has long been a major designer of mice and keyboards, and Panos Panay, the hardware guy in charge of Surface development, came from keyboards, but that still doesn’t prepare you for how elegant a job the company did on this. I hate to say that it’s Apple-like in its simple yet high functionality, but there’s really no other company that could integrate such an accessory with such grace.
- Engadget: You wouldn’t think a 3mm-thick piece of polyurethane could make for a comfy keyboard, but the pressure-sensitive Touch Cover is a compelling companion to your written missives. Just give yourself a little time to get used to it. Microsoft warns it could take four to five days to reach your peak touch-typing speed.
Engadget notes that with the addition of the keyboard, the Surface”becomes a surprisingly capable laptop replacement. Or surrogate, at least.” But therein lies the rub — since they say it takes 5-6 days to get used to, you pretty much have to buy it in order to know if it’s ever going to work for you.
Ballmer has a lot riding on the success of Windows 8. “[His] margin for error is slim after being consistently outpaced by Apple and Google in his nearly 13 years as CEO” says AP.
So what do you think? Thumbs up or down for the Surface?
32 Comments
I don’t see the Surface replacing my laptop, but the dogs think it might be nice to have at night to we can pop in on conversations on the blog & they don’t have to have the big laptop crowding their petting space.
They can be kind of picky.
Will not buy Microsoft products since switching to Apple when Vista was rolled out. I use old XP computers for work and Apple always makes me happy. I took in a five year old macbook and they replaced the keyboard and the power cord for free. Windows doesn’t do free.
I’m certainly intrigued, but since I already have an iPad, I can’t see switching and spending all that money over again. It’ll take some time for Windows 8 to develop much of an “ecosystem.”
Everyone wins.
I’m always highly skeptical about getting on-board before products have been sufficiently rung out. In other words, the gillionth time (give or take a few) tends to be the proverbial charm. So do you suppose that both Win-8 and the tablet are actually ready to go, (Ha ha ha! Just kidding), or should one play a waiting game to be certain of stability, among other things? Also, any comparisons with the Nexus floating around in the ether?
Citizen Hamsher:
What do you mean “…it will require investment in new hardware in order to enjoy full functionality of Windows8″? You mean an old IBM compatible hasta be upgraded? My wife wants to get a new streamlined laptop before we travel out of the country again (we spent a week drivin’ around Lake Superior and the cost of phone and text when we were in Ontario taught us that we will need somethin’ else before we travel to Europe – if the economy ever let’s us outta here).
Because I’m old I’m gunna take this pathetic old HP into the crematorium with me but Kate is younger and she’s gunna need somethin soon.
KEEP THE FAITH AND REMEMBER THAT THE GOAL OF THE BATTLE IS TO LIVE TO CONTINUE TO FIGHT THE WAR!!
“mixed minds”? Is that what we call “fucking hate it” these days? The Win8 desktop experience is the blurst. Hold your Windows 7 tight and never let go.
Does MSFT make their stuff with 3rd world slave labor like AAPL?
Some thoughts –
The HTC smartphone I bought yesterday has a better processor…
What did Dan do to deserve that?! ;)
The answer to your problem here is the ChromeBook.
Again – ChromeBook.
Yesterday’s national security whistleblowers are today’s dumping grounds for despised hardware. I laughed. Poor Dan!
The Surface looks neat. Can I replace the new OS with Ubuntu? Eventually, I’m sure.
2015: that’s when both the new small car (lots of innovations not quite mature) and the pad-with-keyboard and computers markets will be mature. Resist purchasing either one until then.
I’m with Shoto, a second or third-gen adopter. Too much anxiety when the gizmo doesn’t work.
For me pads remain a little bit gimmicky. If the original goal was minimizing the number of necessary movements to operate the device, pads tend to set that aside. And look at the things you do with them one by one: mostly NOT produce, but just consume. (Steve Jobs didn’t want to go there.) BIG screens are so nice; I’ve written my dissertation on a 22″ screen, and every time I start to play with my neat android phone I end up squinting. Movies are for sharing with people, and you need a big screen for that, too; chess with my eight-year-old is fantastic on the big screen, annoying on the phone. . . The only really good things we do are math games, drawing with a stylus (in the car), and watching Brain Pop (highly recommended). Oh, Swiss Army Knife (shine THAT on a pad). Rantova.
Eww. Wouldn’t have anything Windows-only or Microsoft, not even if ABBA agrees to reunite and tour, including a visit in my home.
That was pretty much my response — my ipad has a cracked screen and a broken camera lens, and it has to have a big rubber cover and a screen protector to hold it all together, but it does what I need it to do.
That said, I hate touch screen typing with the white hot light of a thousand suns, and if there’s something that could liberate me from that it would not be a replacement so much as a new kind of device. And as much time as I spent typing, one that could be useful.
If I could afford it, I might buy it.
They say the full Windows 8 tablets won’t be ready until January. I’d be curious to see how the 2 compare.
What is Brain Pop?
jane i love you.
Thumbs down from me. I love the Apple iPad and iPhone. They work great – and no virus problems!
There are lots of third party keyboards to use with my iPad that work perfectly.
Nope – it’s the iPad for me.
Ooops – forgot to leave a link to the third party iPad keyboards:
https://www.google.com/search?q=ipad+keyboard&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&safe=active#q=ipad+keyboard&hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&hs=uWB&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=1a2JUKrRNYn22AWFzICgDg&ved=0CE8Qsxg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=226cca4cc56170df&bpcl=35466521&biw=1482&bih=973
Far as I know it’s Chinese factories; they can’t compete on price, else.
One point: this runs MS Office natively. For business users, that’s a huge win.
Just turned off AdBlock to see if the blog has ads for the dingus. It sure does, sometimes three (top, middle, lower), but when I signed in and the page reloaded, there were no ads. Had to refresh, saw only one ad, refreshed again, and saw three.
The Surface will also be coming out loaded with Windows 8 Pro. I’m waiting for it before getting one.
Jane @ 15: it’s coming out in Jan?
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Surface with Windows RT and Surface with Windows 8 Pro: http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/surface-with-windows-8-pro/help-me-choose
It’s a daily animated documentary, with a quiz that follows. Clever, funny. Created for teens, but my eight-year-old eats it up. For omnivorous intellects.
It’s a class thing with you? I always laugh a little when people act high-minded about their choice of computer. Apple’s secret: it didn’t share. And appealed to a depoliticized sense of virtue in Boomers and Gen Xers.
Madison Avenue had us all figured out at least 40 years ago.
Congratulations, Jane, I think you’ve just coined a new phrase to be used when condemning something. But poor Daniel Ellsberg; surely he doesn’t deserve this? [Reminds me of the old commercials for Life cereal, when the kids would give it to "Mikey," because he'd eat anything.]
I too hate typing on a “flat” surface, and for that reason don’t like my iPad, and don’t even OWN an iPhone. My MacBook, however, is terrific.
I resisted the lure of the Big Apple for many years, but the S-L-O-W opening of Windows plus the constant “virus threats” and many $$$$ pissed away on anti-virus software finally pushed me over the edge.
I use the iPad for traveling, when I can’t carry the MacBook, but often will bite the bullet re the extra weight, just to avoid that flat surface hell.
Yeah, I think all of us “old time” “typists” — we who made money in college & grad school typing other people’s papers, and perhaps “graduated” to an office job where we had to type [on a "real" machine] — are just too spoiled for a flat surface. To say nothing re how severely it slows you down.
I want to know who is Dan Ellsberg and why do you hate him so much to slam with an iPad?
Thumbs down. One, a computer shouldn’t look like a toy for preschoolers (an opinion shared by a young college friend who’s a big Windows enthusiast, gamer, and thus not just the opinion of the fuddy-duddy geek crowd; he already hates Surface and the “me too” direction that Windows has taken, and says he’ll stay with Windows 7 as long as it’s supported if need be).
Moreover, I’m against devices locked-down against their nominal owners as a general principle. If I don’t control it, I don’t trust it.
Personally, I have a hard time conceiving anything that a tablet could do that a netbook (just as portable) can’t do a lot easier. Touchscreen interfaces are hardly natively “intuitive” and moreover you can execute almost any action with something having a keyboard and mouse much faster than you can by scrolling through screens. And who wants to view content through a screen full of fingerprints and smudges?
I also think that the trend towards pushing us towards “appliances” rather than “computers” is bad for a number of reasons. There’s security and privacy issues, as I’ve mentioned, but also we have enough of a problem with e-waste to make it worse by producing “appliances” which are essentially disposable computers.
-stewartm
You mean Jobs didn’t share since during his absence Apple had licensed the Mac OS (Power Computing did well with it for a while), but Jobs stopped the practice (and the Apple II had been licensed for cloning long before).
And yeah the class of product matters (not whether the product denotes the owner’s financial status). My first home computer was a Mac (it was the only home computer at the time with built-in CD-ROM) while I used Windows boxes at work. Whatever task I did on the Mac always required two or three additional operations (clicks or key strokes) in Windows. Very important for me was that the Mac could format floppies for IBM/Windows, but the Windows PCs couldn’t do that. And it mattered that Apple made both the computer and its OS. Windows wasn’t an OS for a long time while it ran under DOS. So I also laughed a little. ;o)
(Don’t have any tablet or smart phone, will get an iPod Touch whenever my 2006 iPod fails.)
getting the following in 2 places (right top & bottom) on the ipad — read in your recent google post, Has google destroyed the fourth estate? (link below), that they’ve dropped fdl from ads? wonder who is adjuggler-dot-net and pubmatic-dot-com…
(function () { function show_ad(rtb) { var request = { ‘aj_ecpm’ : 0 }; rtb.script_url = ‘http://cdn.hadj7.adjuggler.net/banners/’; rtb.confirm_banner_url = ‘http://csm.rotator.hadj7.adjuggler.net/servlet/ajrotator/233570/0/impr?ajkey=V12520878D6J-573J8020K1663014BE02FD4QQQK16676QQP0G00G0Q090341F60000011100002F&pv=5491301163565368′; rtb.ad_height = ’250′; rtb.pubmatic.server_url = ‘http://bid.pubmatic.com/AdServer/AdServerServlet’; request['pubmatic_request'] = { ‘price_floor’ : 1.1, ‘pubId’ : 29297, ‘siteId’ : 31204, ‘adId’ : 29729, ‘kadwidth’ : 300, ‘kadheight’ : 250, ‘kltstamp’ : ’2012-10-25+23%3A40%3A38′, ‘pageURL’ : ‘http%3A%2F%2Fbytegeist.firedoglake.com%2F’, ‘kadpageurl’ : ‘http%3A%2F%2Fbytegeist.firedoglake.com%2F’, ‘ranreq’ : 0.6637947695133992 }; function show_aj_ad() { }
rtb.callAllSources(request, show_aj_ad); } /* Since IE doesn’t guarantee JS execution order, we need to store this ad until rtb.js was successfully loaded */ if (window.adjuggler && window.adjuggler.rtb) { show_ad(window.adjuggler.rtb); } else { if
(!window.adjuggler) { window.adjuggler = { waiting_ads : [] }; } window.adjuggler.waiting_ads.push(show_ad); } })();
weird.
On Topic: i really don’t like the ipad “keypad” either; and i was very disappointed to realize that it’s just a big screen iphone. it’s no better than my windows phone and actually less functional as far as sending links, accessing email, etc., etc. (the ipad was just a means to getting a wireless card at the time, and that has worked out well for me. Also nice for games.
For portability with a keyboard and XP, samsung netbook has worked well for 3 years now <– 10" screen size is a
drawback. I agree with commenters above that buying windows 8 before "real life" testing is not really useful when there are so many variations of lightweight net books available.
Does have a certain irony, doesn’t it?
If it’s pre-loaded with Office Home & Student, doesn’t that increase value by about $100? (no snide remarks a la “2nd prize 2 copies of Home Office” please) That and extra 16 GBytes memory….