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The MS Surface Pro

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Re: The MS Surface Pro

#51

Post by seanmcdirmid »

gamblor956 wrote: post #44
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the keyboard covers/cases and the typing, those people are just pretending right?

Highly location dependent. In some coffee shops, the people using tablets or laptops are probably working or studying. In many others, the people are there to be seen or to give off the appearance of working. I live in LA and work near Beverly Hills, and so the vast majority of the people that I see in coffee shops are just posing.

Strange. When I visit the states I'm based usually in Seattle/Bellevue, where I see starbucks full of people writing on their iPads, bizarrely enough (you'd expect to see some Surfaces now given the locale but...). At home in China, iPads are common but mostly used for entertainment, not work.

I seriously doubt its posing anymore. When everyone in the coffee shop has an iPad (including the partners), what is there to pose about?

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#52

Post by raganwald »

The conclusion I draw from everything I've heard is that the Surface Pro is a terrible iPad and an excellent PC laptop. Issues like the battery life, heat, weight, RAM free, and so on are reasonable for a Windows machine.

If my perspective is correct, look for the Surface Pro to cannibalize sales from MS's "partners." I do expect it to appeal to the kind of person who buys a PC laptop and an iPad. And that's a great market for MS to defend. But for people who want just a tablet, I expect iPads to carry on selling by the container.

If Microsoft's vision of everyone needing a computer is correct, the Surface pro will destroy the laptop. But if Apple's vision of a "post-PC" world is correct, the vast majority of the tablet market will be just tablets, and the iPad will continue to thrive.

It all seems to come down to whether you think of tablets as weak computers with a tablet interface or whether you think of them as an appliances that run software.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#53

Post by jacquesm »

raganwald wrote: post #52

The conclusion I draw from everything I've heard is that the Surface Pro is a terrible iPad and an excellent PC laptop. Issues like the battery life, heat, weight, RAM free, and so on are reasonable for a Windows machine. If my perspective is correct, look for the Surface Pro to cannibalize sales from MS's "partners." I do expect it to appeal to the kind of person who buys a PC laptop and an iPad. And that's a great…

It's been a while since the tablet market was defined as 'iPad'.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#54

Post by p3rs3us »

raganwald wrote: post #52

The conclusion I draw from everything I've heard is that the Surface Pro is a terrible iPad and an excellent PC laptop. Issues like the battery life, heat, weight, RAM free, and so on are reasonable for a Windows machine. If my perspective is correct, look for the Surface Pro to cannibalize sales from MS's "partners." I do expect it to appeal to the kind of person who buys a PC laptop and an iPad. And that's a great…

Personally I would go for single device that does everything I need. Something on the lines of what Ubuntu is doing. Even Surface to an extent solves this issue. I don't want to carry an iPhone to call/msg/listen to music, an iPad to casually use internet/read/play games and a laptop for everything else. Better carry one phone which does call/msg/music/internet,reading and minor editing/office stuffs when plugged to dock.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#55

Post by Felix21 »

One article with a meaningful use-case and i am very tempted to buy the the Surface Pro.

I think this is where Apple's marketing Excels over Microsoft's.

Apple will show you use-cases like this all day long, showing you how their products are a better tool to get your job done.

Microsoft on the other hand -"it has more memory", "USB", "its Powerful", "hd screen", "it runs excel", "side by side apps", "YAWN".

Great article; VERY TEMPTING.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#56

Post by jagermo »

gfunk911 wrote: post #5

Interesting. We now have an actual niche/use case where the Surface Pro could be a compelling leader, and not just "totally decent." Artists. Also, doesn't an apple-style commercial where somebody gets an email with a word doc attached, edits it, and emails it back with changes while on the train or something seem obvious....

Another niche would be journalists (and of course bloggers). I visit trade shows a lot and every gramm i can could down is nice. I tried the iPad, but it didn't realy work, mostly because I was unable to connect the camera in a decent way (the camera connection kit is a joke).

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#57

Post by DeepDuh »

devcpp wrote: post #38
omaranto wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"iPads still fail pretty hard at being useful during math class." I know a couple of people who take notes on their iPads during math talks, they use what Gabe called an ?eraser tip? capacitive touch stylus and an app that shows you your actual size notes above and has a zoned in box at the bottom where you wrote big. I've tried a similar setup on my Nexus 7 and found it pretty comfortable, I imagine on the larger iP…

Why would you go through that when paper is much more comfortable to write on?

Isn't it obvious? When you have your stuff stored digitally it

(a) takes care of the organizational aspects of note taking and

(b) makes notes reusable.

The payoff as a student is exam prep: Now you sit at a powerful desktop computer with, say, 2x 21 inch screen estate at your disposal. You have a file explorer, a layout document editor (I use Pages and/or Keynote for this) and a good pdf viewer open (with your exported notes). Now it's a matter of copy & pasting all the information from your notes, the official class notes, literature, etc. onto your layout document which then becomes your summary.

This is of course doable by hand but it's a lot more work and it's not as easy to extend it - you can't just make room for new information on a full piece of paper (and summaries, especially the ones you can take to exams, tend to be very full).

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#58

Post by jim_h »

Bockit wrote: post #11

It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual sections, maybe a storage, space, benchmarks, screen, software kind of thing, we have a guy who has specific use cases for it talking about how he used it for those cases, what worked and what didn't. And then comparing it to how he normally does those kinds of activ…

I also enjoyed the review. A lot of reviews on devices with a stylus, especially wacom enabled devices, never really go into any detail about the feature. It's generally glossed over with short paragraph about how it works fine and their test was just to scribble a few words.

Most of the reviewers never seem to consider the idea that using a stylus would be a remotely useful feature and never put any thought using examining it. As a result, the review is mostly useless for someone who does want to use the feature.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#59

Post by bvdbijl »

Cushman wrote: post #25
recoiledsnake wrote: post #14

> I left it at 125% and just like he had suggested my color picker was working again! I finished the strip at 125% magnification with no trouble but then I had to switch it back to 150% when I was finished. You can disable the DPI scale up in the compatibility tab of the file properties of the exe. In this case he could've set it for Sketchbook's exe and the rest of the OS would continue to be at 150%. Hopefully, thi…

That URL is deeply confusing.

Yeah, a link to an apple help doc that shows a dialog of Battlefield 3

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#60

Post by asafira »

Bockit wrote: post #11

It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual sections, maybe a storage, space, benchmarks, screen, software kind of thing, we have a guy who has specific use cases for it talking about how he used it for those cases, what worked and what didn't. And then comparing it to how he normally does those kinds of activ…

I'm going to admit that I haven't had the chance to read the review in its entirety, but I wanted to reply to this comment anyway. I have a similar issue where I feel as if I am not getting a lot out of many of the reviews I read for products online.

For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. Many reviews will put up charts and graphs with benchmarks. But what exactly does a score of (for example) 11,204 mean? The answer, to me, is VERY LITTLE. You can compare it to another phone, but if another phone has a score of, say, 10,000, does that mean this phone is \approx 10% better? Is it 10% faster in what I am going to use it for? No, of course not --- you can't measure how good a device is with a single number, nor even if you single out just its graphics capabilities or whatever slightly more specific metric you choose.

Otherwise, articles might throw more subjective descriptions in the picture. "The experience was very smooth". Maybe reading it through quickly that sounds all well and good, but how much does that tell you? It's still a very vague term simply because many of these products have so many things going on it's hard to encapsulate them in a review in a useful way.

Anyway, in this case, the article pinpoints a very particular task and examines how good the device was at that one task. I think that is already a great sign that you can get a lot more out of this than a much more general review.

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