Not exactly the coffee table size I was expecting from something called "Surface".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9 ... ata_player

When the waiter brings you your drink, he’ll be using a small Surface as a tray. Also, the surface will give you data about the drink - ingredients, possible risk of cancer, alcohol units etc.. It could be really useful to have around the place*.







*Sarcasm.

That may be the first time MS have made something I'd consider buying. I'm going to lie down now...

Awesome, a 'tablet' that wants to be a laptop.

It doesn't seem to have done Asus any harm, for instance. It could also be a great way to sell Windows 8, and it might need that

I think having a keyboard on the screen protector is a great idea

Is surface a solution being shoehorned into the market?

Looking for a use for the name that will sell...perhaps

In theory, yes. But the keyboard comes into contact with the screen, and it’s likely to be covered in whatever oil, grease etc. the user has on his or her fingers. Apparently, the keyboard cover is made of the same kind of fluffy material that Apple’s Smart Covers are made of. I have lines (which can be sped off) on the screen where the folds in the cover are - this is where that fluffy material does not contact the screen.

I am reminded of laptops where you would get marks on the screen caused by keyboard contact and grease transfer. IF you weren’t quick with a piece of paper when you shut the lid from day 0, you’d be doomed to have an imprint of the board on the screen. Apple laptops, especially the earlier PowerBook G4s suffered from this.

For what it’s worth, the Apple Newton was a pretty capable machine, in a tablet-like form factor. Word processing, spread sheet, database, sketching, internet activities, stylus, etc. etc.. There was an optional keyboard. There was even one with a keyboard attached in a clamshell configuration - the eMate.

The tablet PC Gates is holding is just that - a full blown laptop PC with a stylus, as well as a keyboard behind the screen. Heavy, cumbersome and not the kind of device the iPad and Surface are.

The tablets Jobs and Ballmer are holding in those pictures are very different beasts to the one Gates has, and they owe more to the Newton than they do a laptop.

What is interesting is the way Apple and Microsoft app[ear to be going with these.

Apple spun out a version of Mac OS X into their hand held devision, and grounded what is now known as iOS on that. In short - what runs on an iOS device should, in theory, run on a Mac. Indeed, we are seeing a slow move of OS X (nee Mac OS X) into the iOS space. I think we will eventually see a device that can run both, and maybe Apple will switch processors for their desktop and laptops to an ARM core instead of an Intel one. Note that iOS is already an ARM system.

Conversely, Microsoft are doing almost the opposite. By having an ARM and an Intel Surface, they are diverging their market. This strikes me as odd - and I can’t help wondering why they would do that. We’ve heard a lot about Windows being compiled for ARM architecture - and this is why, but why cloud the waters with two very different architectures? Seems odd to me. Any powerhouse application is not likely to work that well on an Intel Surface device anyway (certainly without generating heat), so why not just aim at a purely ARM based architecture, compile applications for that, and keep the system cooler and lighter?

You could argue its the other way round with the iOS moving into the OSX space. How long will it be until there is no substantial differentiation between the two except on the form factor it resides in?


because they will be offering the product to two different camps, the consumer (joe blogs) and the prosumer (buisness and geeks). The consumer version is just the user that wants to surf, email, browse and "consume" media. Whilst the prosumer will want more oomph to do proper "work".

Given the number of keyboard accessories for the iPad, it seems a lot of people want an add-on keyboard...

I see this as a sort of Google Nexus for the Windows RT / Windows 8 market place, showing the other hardware manufacturers what a reference Windows tablet should look like. Hopefully it will inspire the "real" manufacturers to produce decent tablets.

Google is supposed to be working on the same principle for their tablets as well, rumours have them delivering a Nexus tablet at Google IO next week.

I haven't seen the video for this product yet, but in all the stills I've seen of the Surface, I haven't seen an on-screen keyboard.
It does have one, right?

Mark