Hands on with the Windows 8 fondleslab Developers attending Microsoft's BUILD conference will go home with a brand new Windows 8 tablet from Samsung. And it's not half bad. The fondleslab is rather curiously named the Samsung Windows 8 Developer Preview PC – no mention of the word tablet – and it's unlikely to see the light of day as a commercial product. But it …
Clearly this does not pose the question as to how well Win 8 runs on less capable hardware, as if you watched the keynote, you saw Win8 running on a 2 year old netbook, and saw MS demonstrate how efficiently the OS runs compared to Win7. I take it you are a Mac/iPad user, given the fanbois undertones in your article.
I immediately thought of the 11" Macbook Air: small, light, full desktop OS: a good battery life is not an impossible proposition at all for this device. In fact a touch screen and a detachable keyboard are the only things missing from the Air.
Microsoft seems to plan on tablet-PC convergence on Windows 8, IIRC the traditional desktop will be just an optional UI app running on top of a lightweight OS.
"Clearly, this tablet is designed to show off Windows 8 at its best, but it raises the question of how well the new OS will run with less powerful systems."
ARM Socs are getting more and more powerful for the same power consumption and even Intel appears (although a little late in the day) to have woken up.
"Intel promises '20X' power reduction with 'Haswell' chips" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/13/haswell_at_adc_2011/)
The time when hardware capable of running a full song with choruses os without slaughtering the battery is rapidly approaching. I honestly do not believe that is going to be a major issue. Things are developing so fast that in a couple of years time at the very latest the specs of that Sammy that MS have given the attendees at Build will be regarded as *very* ordinary and as you point out are fully capable of running a full fat os without sweating.
Just a comment on the people who down voted this post.
WHY?
What Artic fox wrote was very, very reasonable. The fact that it got down voted says a lot more about those people than the actual comment. Sounds like, these people don't like the truth - and the only way to vent their anguish is to down vote! [Obviously they can't post a credible response].
Not disagreeing with the sentiment of your post but the time scale is a lot off. The PR statement on Haswell is a typical piece of Intel smoke and mirrors.
The 20x power reduction is a simply an impossible reduction in less than two years. If you read through the article it doesn't include when CPU is actually running (ie its a Idle figure), requires optimized full SSDs, Screens etc from third party vendors etc. Your looking here at phone design/territory where in a full idle shutdown it will do quite a few days running. For a tablet and not phone that is a highly misleading comparison without any requirement to be 'always on' for incoming calls etc.
Operating in normal use however its still going to be only around 12 hours or so. Maybe some more maybe less...The current Intel designs are still lagging ARM still by a significant margin in power consumption and so they are still playing catchup
I suppose all I am really saying is that it is highly likely that we will see x86 devices with considerably longer battery life than quite a few people (for various reasons/motivations) are currently assuming. That the picture being presented of devices so noisy and with such poor battery life and/or performance as to be impracticable/almost useless is in fact a picture with a significantly shorter shelf life than some people are claiming. You are however quite right in saying that we should treat the figures that Intel have provided with considerable caution.
so it's a "developers tablet" and is not portable so why spend 3/4 of the article talking about a bloated piece of hardware? And didn't Microsoft say that your new applications will run on a Windows 8 desktop and tablet? That would mean there was no need for a "developers tablet" unless it's swag to try and get developers to look at it.
And just because you see the label ARM, it does not mean it is what you see in Apple iPads or Android machines. Some vendors are sampling quad core ARM Cortex a9 chips and those are probably what you see Windows 8 running on.
This really sounds like the same old Windows tablet gig we've heard for the past 20 years. Expect something too heavy to easily use or else it'll be under powered or have a very short battery life.
"BUILD Developers attending Microsoft's BUILD conference will go home with a brand new Windows 8 tablet from Samsung."
Microsoft are famous for it. They give away Xboxes, laptops, mobiles to EVERYONE attending these events. If you ever say a bad thing about Microsoft, you no longer get invited.
In my books, that's a bribe.
I've seen absolutely nothing about how the W8 tablet behaves in portrait mode - which is how I generally use my iPad...
Having said that, W8 does look impressive - it already has plenty of fans*.
* Getting rid of all that excess heat from the CPU, ha ha ha. I'm sure it won't be an issue when it launches in a year's time. Almost certainly.
My preferred mode is mouse-clicker in one hand and stylus to point at screen objects in the other. Of course this requires the type of tablet and stylus where you can point to move the cursor without tapping - and some software doesn't respond to clicks when you're pointing with a stylus; mostly system utilities and setup software (HP TouchSmart TM2-1010EA). For "typing", since due to RSI-type disability I can't type, I use an optimised on-screen keyboard called Fitaly (five rows, letters ETAOIN are contiguous and central), and I achieve about fifty per cent of my previous keyboard speed. Handwriting stinks for efficient input: speech recognition is... hopeful, but it needs quite a lot of processing power.
Fond memories of Fitaly on my many Palm models. A truly excellent piece of research translated into software and I loved the way it was available across most apps.
From my research into gestural interfaces, stylus-based interfaces are still very popular in Asian countries where the local language requires more precision than can be achieved with a finger. Having the choice would be fabulous on my iPhone and iPad for precision work even now.
Having said that, for a lot of sketching work, remarkably good UI refinements in smart alignment can go a long way to compensate - Nick Nallick did a great job with the usability of Intaglio Sketchpad. I wouldn't have believed a vector drawing app could be usable just on an iPhone until I tried it.
Basically, MS have done an Apple - taken loads of other people's ideas and stuck them together in an original and useful way. Most significant development in OSes since Windows 95, integrating the three threads of modern computing - mobile, traditional & cloud computing - in a way no-one else has done yet.
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