Holy Cow, Microsoft made something truly innovative! This tablet is stunning. Here is the back-story way back in the late 90's early 2000's good old father of Microsoft Bill Gates thought it would be a great idea to have a tablet PC. Sadly, even though they made software adjustments for touch, the OEM's just botched it up and it just didn't work well. This tablet that was announced last night is basically what that original idea should of been, and I have to admit it looks stunning. Microsoft just lite a fire under the OEM's to say hey this is what a Windows 8 tablet should be. Now, go try to catch up to it.
Check out the announcement video below.
Now exactly how well will this go in the market against Apple and all the Google tablets out there? Well here is the thing Microsoft for the most part is going a whole different route than Apple went with this tablet idea. Apple believes that a computer and a tablet should be two different things for mostly different purposes. So far this strategy has worked outstandingly well for them. However, Microsoft is basically saying we think that the future of the PC is the tablet so their tablets will run Full Windows 8 mostly. The reason I put the mostly at the end is that Microsoft is releasing two different versions one an ultra thin ARM based tablet will run Windows RT and the intel version will run Windows 8 Pro. The difference is the ARM RT version will run Metro Apps only (similar to other tablet apps,) but the fact that the intel version will run Windows 8 PRO means that not only will you have the great Metro style tiles for your tablet viewing but you will also have an actual PC under the hood. Depending on the exact specs of these tablets (which hopefully we will now soon,) you can do almost anything that you would do normally on Windows.
The design of this tablet is just great, very thin, very original design but what caught my eye the most is that cover keyboard. Did you see it in the video above? It is like Apple's smart cover but instead of just a felt lined inside to the cover you have an actual touch based keyboard built into the cover. That is a great idea! Apple please copy that for the iPad, stat! haha.
Anyway back to the Surface Tablet, We do not have exact specs, release dates, or price ranges yet, but hopefully we will have all that information soon enough. (Update:) We do know that the intel version will have in ivybridge processor and be similar in specs to all the Ultrabooks out there. Both tablets have front and rear cameras, a full usb port, displayport, an SD card slot, and can come in a hard drive size up to 128 gigs.
Now, I have seen a lot of people talking about this online and saying great hardware but where are the apps! Well, I do agree they should of spent a little bit more time explaining this concept but guys the apps are already out there (for the intel version.) It's Windows, any windows app that will be compatible with Windows 8 will be compatible with this puppy. I think they should of stated this a lot better in their presentation yesterday but the fact remains that this is a full fledged Windows Computer. Now how will that all translate with the RT version? I am not sure. Simply translating Windows phone apps to the tablet may work but we have yet to find out exactly. This may or not be worth it to the developers out there. We will just have to wait and see. I for one do not understand why they wanted to make two tablets. I feel like the true Tablet PC with intel will really take off but I am not sure about the RT version, with very little apps out there for the Mobile Windows platform I think it will be hard pressed to catch up with the iPad's and Android Tablet's out there. But then again this true Tablet PC could really catch on and with this amazing design and innovation we can only assume it will sell like crazy!
This is a great showing from Microsoft. How well will it compete will have to be seen, but keep in mind this is technically a whole different ball game when it comes to the tablet market or old ball game if you want to consider the original Windows Tablet PC's. I am just excited to see Microsoft wake up and start really innovating here. Finally someone other than Apple is making something really cool!
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