They have a video on the main page. The video is a minute long. They have asked for my attention for a minute. In that minute, they have not told me anything about what the Surface can do for me, and why I should care about it. I'm absolutely baffled by that. Yes, I might know what it is, and have some idea about what it can do, but if this was a television commercial, I'd bet money that such a campaign would be a qu…
You got more than I did. I got slugged in the face by a demand for a silverlight update and then my browser crashed and I lost all my open tabs. I hate that.
Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
201–210 of 697 posts
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
ClearType has been around for a very long time. It's basically subpixel-rendering that improves the visual quality of text (sort of effectively tripling the LCD resolution). Last I checked, Microsoft had patented the hell out of it (and I last checked a few years ago). I think they're right about touting a technology that effectively triples text-display resolution. And for your other observation about the whole ench…
I don't know how they're going to make subpixel anti-aliasing work if you can rotate the display. I wouldn't be surprised if they just are re-using the ClearType name and it's not actually sub-pixel anti-aliased, just regular anti-aliased (like the iPad).
The OS knows, at some level, the orientation it's displaying the screen in. So in principle, there's no reason it can't use subpixel rendering appropriately. Although it might be hard to achieve - I don't know how the graphics stack works.
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#203Seems really interesting, I'm just hoping we can get at least a little bit of the 'spirit' of the courier on the design of the Microsoft "surface"
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#2042012 is the year third party OEMs start to go extinct. First (and always) Apple, now Microsoft, soon Google/Motorola. There may be some niche markets left over for third party OEMs but otherwise I think they're done. No wonder HP wanted out of the PC industry. Maybe they knew something we didn't?
HP went through 4 CEOs, bought and dismantled Palm for no reason and at great capital loss, announced and then rescinded their departure from the PC industry. It's well known HP doesn't know anything about anything. Agreed that OEMs should go away.
Why do you want them to go away? I think generally industry consolidation is a bad thing for consumers.
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#205I'm really hopeful for a tablet (read: something light with a decent interface) where I can do general-purpose computing (read: install my own stuff and have reasonable processing power) so I really hope this succeeds on these levels. Some of the ideas at least are very worthy.
Having said that, there is nowhere near enough detail to make an informed judgement on anything yet (except the PR strategy - which is [pretty laughably] a poor imitation of what Apple does).
Still. We live in hope.
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
All-in-all, it's a big, big play on Windows 8/RT. A kernel that can perform optimally on ARM/Intel on mobile devices and also support PC devices is a huge achievement - the entire thread-library would have to be one super-cool piece of software engineering. That and elsewhere within the OS, is where the innovation lies, in my opinion. And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (n…
> And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript. I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. I race for a native app when it comes to content consumption, and native is also required to provide the requisite stream DRM used by Netflix…
That's because usually there is a browser-based layer which runs that HTML/JavaScript.
Here it is Metro UI (via HTML5) powered using JavaScript (running natively on Windows) - equivalent to a C++ native app with a Metro UI.
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#207They have a video on the main page. The video is a minute long. They have asked for my attention for a minute. In that minute, they have not told me anything about what the Surface can do for me, and why I should care about it. I'm absolutely baffled by that. Yes, I might know what it is, and have some idea about what it can do, but if this was a television commercial, I'd bet money that such a campaign would be a qu…
What I got was mercury, dust/particulates, fractured minerals, and the sense of invasive magnetic fields. I think they were going for power and ... something. Instead I get toxicity, contamination, brittleness.
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#208Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#209The Windows button is oriented horizontally. That's an interesting choice. Is metro not really designed to be used on vertical orientation?
Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet
#210They have a video on the main page. The video is a minute long. They have asked for my attention for a minute. In that minute, they have not told me anything about what the Surface can do for me, and why I should care about it. I'm absolutely baffled by that. Yes, I might know what it is, and have some idea about what it can do, but if this was a television commercial, I'd bet money that such a campaign would be a qu…
I watched it and it did tell me one thing: it's a bit like an iPad but it comes with a cover that's also a keyboard. And that's probably going to be the big selling point. "It's a bit like an iPad, but it comes with a cover that's also a keyboard" .
I think the correct play here is for Microsoft to start selling keyboard covers for the iPad.