Microsoft Surface priced up for Blighty Advanced orders for Microsoft's Surface tablet are now being taken in the UK. Prices starting at £399. That'll get you a 32GB version of the ARM-based slate without the touch-to-type keyboard-equipped Touch Cover, which comes bundled for an additional £80. Buy the cover on its own and you'll pay £100. Alternatively, those …
Why is it so dear? Apple is notorius for ramping up prices, but they are selling a well established luxury product. MS are launching what is ment to be a device to show of the capabilities of windows 8 rt. By selling it at the price of an ipad they are making the decision easy for conusmers; go for the well known industry leader, or try somthing new. Most consumers go for the easy option, which in this case means apple.
But yeah, i havnt pre ordered one, cant see the point, i should be able to pick one up for £200 on the shelf next to the touchpad and the playbook.
The entry level iPad is £399 for a 16Gb version.
The entry level Surface is £399 for a 32Gb version.
Surely "dear" is relative is it not? If you've decided the iPad (in any form factor) is too expensive, then you need to go and get yourself a Nexus tablet, because the Surface was never going to come in at those prices.
As you say "dear is relative". Its dear when you look at what they are trying to do. HP and Rim tried this approach and they failed spectacularly, why does MS think they can do better? We on the reg forums arent truly the target demographic for tablets, the average joe on the street is. So when they have the option of an ipad or a surface, what makes MS think they will go for the surface? Its untested, untried, and effectivly the same price as the ipad. So they might as well get the ipad. Joe know exactly what he is getting, and he has the extra cache of buying into a luxery brand. The surface is too dear.
"Its untested, untried, and effectivly the same price as the ipad. So they might as well get the ipad. "
For someone making an argument that the Surface will fail even if the cognoscenti like it, because it's not what the "person on the street likes", you show a weak grasp of how "the person on the street" thinks. They don't analyze past performance much or consider the company's history. They walk into a shop and play with it or watch a video or play with a friend's and say: "that's cool. I want that one."
The ones who analyze in excrutiating details, are us
Simples!
One word - Office.
The Surface has been touted as coming with a near-feature complete version of MS Office. This is a big selling point for many and easily worth a few quid extra.
Whilst I own Apple kit in the form of Macs, for my tablet and phone fix, I'm Android. However, I've pre-ordered the Surface based purely on the fact that it comes with a proper Office suite. I've used pretty much all of the Android Office suites, and tried the iPad equivalents too, and none of them is capable of replacing MS Office for my requirements.
Surface and Windows RT may just change all that, and I'm prepared to take a punt on it.
The entry level iPad is the iPad 2 16GB, which comes in at £329.
The New iPad starts at £399, but it has a Retina screen with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 compared to the Surface's rather measly 1366 x 768. As such, I think people are justified in thinking that the Surface is expensive for what it is.
We pay about $15 on this side of the pond for a 16GB memory card. Sure, it's nice to have it built-in, but that's not a terribly huge win for Microsoft.
As others have mentioned, Apple is established as THE luxury brand in this market. Most other companies who've gone head-to-head with Apple on price have lost... who wants a Fiat for the price of a Mercedes?
ASUS is another to look at. But look at the specs -- Microsoft isn't selling a top-of-the-line device here, but a mass market device. They're using a lower resolution screen, versus the TF700's 1920x1200. The Surface is based on the T30 Tegra 3, rather than the faster T33 in the TF700... and DDR2 memory, supposedly. The TF700 uses DDR3-1600 DRAM. Sure, the iPad 3 is only based on DDR2, but they have a dual-channel memory controller, versus the Tegra's single channel. Yes, the Surface RT comes with twice the RAM, at 2GB. But it's not like any version of Windows to be easy on RAM. The Surface sports dual 1Mpixel cameras, versus 2/8Mpixel for the TF700... the old iPad had lower rez cameras, too, but the new one's photo-quality.
So Microsoft's less competitive here than I expected.
Hopefully that's typical of the bloat of WinRT applications.
I just checked my Transformer tablet here... I have 53GB free out of 64GB internally, 48GB free out of 64GB on the SD card (music, mostly). But that's also with a couple dozen books and 182 apps installed. That includes Firefox, Chrome, Emacs, g++, Terminal, Adobe Reader, and two office productivity packages. And yeah, some games.
Part of the deal, I suspect, is that Android (and iOS) devices have a fairly big chunk of NAND flash, which holds much of the operating system proper. Microsoft seems to be building these PC style, where the NAND flash is just a BIOS loader, and they get all of the OS from NOR flash (your flash drive). So the Windows device's 32GB really is 32GB, the Android device's 32GB might actually be more like 36-40GB.
"Simple, it does a lot more. It's a tablet with a full blown OS."
It's not a "full blown OS", by which I assume you mean a desktop OS. It's metro plus a skeleton desktop to support MS Office. I assume that the desktop only exists at all as a kludge because Microsoft couldn't port the MS Office suite over in time.
Not sure there's any actual desktop... Office runs on this as a Metro application. Yes, it's still using Win32 (the usual Windows API) not stuck with WinRT only. But that's a trick only Microsoft can do.. no one else gets to use Win32 on Windows RT.
And as far as Windows RT being a "full blown desktop OS"... new to mobile, are we? They all run designed-for-mobile middleware/app frameworks, Windows RT included... Microsoft's tablet/phone OS is the WinRT API over top of the Windows NT kernel. Apple's got the usual Darwin OS (BSD UNIX, Mach kernel) on iOS, and in fact, a good bit of the OS itself comes from MacOS. Android is running over top of Linux, not just for desktops, but the choice of most server, data warehouse, and supercomputers.
What makes the OS are the applications. RIght now, you can do all kinds of desktop things on Linux... I have g++ and Emacs on my ASUS tablet, for example. And two different office suites. WinRT will have MS-Office, and that's about it... nothing else is going to be an easy port, since it's exactly like moving your application to a whole new operating system. One reason the early Windows 7 Phone and Windows 8 Metro apps are written in HTML, CSS and Javascript... but that's no way to write desktop-class stuff.
Oh no it's not.... It does much less than a £139 Nexus7....
Seems you sir, are one of many that Microsoft have confused into purchasing by their Windows 8 ./ Windows 8 RT naming scheme,.
This is the one that doesn't have any apps and can't run Windows software,
#EPICFAIL.
Well MS don't have the bulk purchase discount Apple do. But maybe they want to compete on features at the high end, not be another cheapo product - they want people to not simply buy because it's cheaper than iPad. That's a reasonable angle to take, IF it works.
@JDX
That's exactly what Ballmer said. Almost exactly those words. However MS took the same approach with Windows Phone 7 pricing it to be similar to the iPhone and we know how successful that was.
On the other hand, Microsoft is a wholesaler not a retailer. So maybe it's leaving room for one of the other tablet makers to enter the market and in the meantime just gathering the low hanging fruit.
But Microsoft *is* a wholesaler not a retailer. It doesn't really know how to treat regular end users. Geeks like me, sure. For example, I don't get the iPad (or tablets in general) but friend loves hers because Apple offer a care package which means she can go to the store, ask questions, have apps installed - you know, touchy feely stuff. It will be a shock if that's what Microsoft offer.
Me too, just pre-ordered the 64GB one with the touch cover, and a 64GB microSDXC card to pop into the card slot. Looking forward to all that touchy-feely goodness and full integration with my Windows Phone. Will be upgrading my desktop and laptop to W8 too, they both have touchscreens :)
Well if it went the way of the HP TouchPad, that would be more like 7 weeks. Disastrous for HP, but brilliant for consumers. I have one, recently put Android on it and it runs like a dream - fantastic hardware once you get past its somewhat incomplete onboard software. If Microsoft did something similar, they'd do a lot of people a big favour!
My hunch is that they won't though, and that the Surface will do well, at the least with the corporate sector who are extremely committed to Microsoft. The iPad's sold well in that market (all the senior managers at my work have one), but I can see the lure of MS and especially of full-blown Office to be pretty tempting for corporate IT depts.
Microsoft have seen the money Apple make, not just off the tablet but the peripherals and have decided to copy them. £100 for a keyboard is taking the piss by any measure. Probably costs £10 tops to make.
What I'd be interested is how many of these "Windows" tablets get returned when it transpires that it's not actually Windows but Windows RT and is therefore incompatible with pretty much everything.
What I'd be interested is how many of these "Windows" tablets get returned when it transpires that it's not actually Windows but Windows RT and is therefore incompatible with pretty much everything.
That's a real issue, I think, and something not all that often postulated these days in the blogosphere. I mean, we're all nerds here -- kind of a precondition to our being here -- and thus, we know this (if you don't, hang your head in shame, then go read up on the fact that Windows RT is Windows only because "Windows" is Microsoft's brand name for any OS they create, and it implies nothing about compatibility).
So some people will buy these entirely based on the Windows/Microsoft branding. And they'll be flooding Microsoft and the support blogs about "How do I install X" on my shiny new Windows RT tablet. Can I hook up a CD drive? Just wait. Sure, this won't be everyone, but I'll bet it's more than just a fringe. This may be epic confusion. All hail Discordia!
Let us assume some people like the look of it, like the 32 Gig for the price of the iPad3, and don't realise or not about iPad2 resolution for the price of iPad3 or the total lack of application on the RT platform, then there is still one massive elephant in this room left.
Internet Explorer.
The main use of a tablet is web surfing and I can't think of any reason besides torture who can lead to someone using that abomination of a web browser.
At least let us have Chrome or Firefox on the thing.
You can get Chrome (it's actually in some of the Microsoft promo shots) and maybe Firefox eventually.
What they're not telling you is that these are not going to be full implementations. WinRT will not, for example, allow data to turn into code. Thus, a browser can't implement a modern Javascript, because they all use JITs (Just-in-time compilers) that mandate data becoming code in an application. So you'll either have very poor Javascript performance, or they'll be using Microsoft's Javascript engine. Maybe not a big deal, but this is very much like Apple... Microsoft has special powers in Windows RT machines (eg, the power to use the Win32 APIs) that everyone else lacks.
The problem is microsoft has burned their early adopters with windows phone. Apple has slowly upgraded ipad and iphone, so that consumers are not stuffed when the newer version comes out.
There are a few people who are keen to jump in, but I think a lot more people will happily sit with their popcorn and wait to see if another disaster movie like palm / HP is going to unfold.
If developers are waiting too, then microsoft has a big problem.
Microsoft didnt burn early adoptors at all. I have had my Samsung Omnia for 2 years and its still a great phone that's faster to use than the latest iPhone or Android handset.
I will be upgrading the the Lumia 920 as soon as I can, but If I wasnt then i would still be getting the Windows Phone 7.8 update. Thats more than most old Android handsets get...
No regrets yet. The Asus has a better screen, the keyboard dock is more worthwhile because it adds battery life and ports, and it currently has a better app ecosystem. My phone is Android too, which is convenient for sharing apps and their data. I do find Android 4.1 a bit limited on a device of this calibre, and I'd like the WinRT Snap-2-apps feature. (Hopefully Android will get it, in due course.) I'm not bothered about Office.
I'd rather have had a full desktop Windows 8, without giving up battery life, but the former won't be available for several more months and the latter could be years. With it just being Windows RT, and at that price, it's not very attractive to me. Maybe in a year or two's time, when/if the app store is more mature. I might have changed my phone by then too.
I don't know anyone familiar with the industry who expected Microsoft to sell at or below cost, why spend a fortune to destroy oem business, aggravate Intel, and put the core windows business in jeopardy. 199 was one of those daft figures for the gullible or conspiracy minded types on a slow news day.
Could it be that my eyes are no longer what they used to be or is it just that on a 10" tablet screen the final screen resolution simply isn't that important one you get into the regions of 720p widescreen?
I could easily imagine that better colour gamut would be noticeable, but not sure if Apples screen would be that much better that the MS screen based purely on resolution.
Disclaimer: I've not used either (or any) tablets and am genuinely curious if the difference in screen res is that dramatic such as to make it a selling point for normal day to day use, ie would you know just by using it or do you need to place them side by side to be able to spot the difference?
I have a 24" monitor positioned about 30" away from me and it's 1920x1200 resolution (actually, I have two). 1366x768 at 10.6" That's 80 pixels per inch wide on the monitor and 128 pixels per inch wide on the tablet. Need to allow a little leeway because I'll be holding a tablet about half the distance to my face that I will a monitor, but if I sit that distance from my monitor it still looks fine. So I don't know if the screen on the SurfaceRT is good, bad or brilliant (there's a lot more to screen quality than resolution) but it's certainly possible that the screen is fine at 10.6" without being 720p.
There are also downsides to massive resolutions as well. The battery in the iPad3 is massively larger than the iPad2, but operating time is roughly the same. That's because the screen eats a lot more power. Apple could have had a really long battery life for the iPad3 but they chose screen resolution as their selling point instead (rightly so). Also, it takes considerably more processor power to run a much higher resolution. Take a mid-range graphics card and run a modern game at a low resolution - fine. Now whack it up to the highest resolution, say 2560x1440 and watch frame rates drop, or have to lower other settings to compensate. Low-power mobile devices don't normally have a lot of processing power to waste. What would you rather have for example? A fast refresh rate or a higher resolution? You want both of course which brings us back to the only realistic answer - there are a lot of factors in a screen and what you really need to do is try a screen out and see how it looks. But in answer to your question there's no reason why a 10" screen at lower than 720p can't be a very good screen.
You would need to be closer to Surface than 43cm with 20/20 vision to be able to distinguish a higher resolution screen than the one it has. Microsoft's Clear Type and the lower reflectivity of the Surface screen compared to he iPad give a sharper image anyway: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57534066-75/microsoft-surface-beats-the-ipad-in-display-quality/
Clearly you've never tried to do any *real* work with Android Office suites, because if you had you'd know that they are all incapable of anything other than fairly rudimentary document creation and editing.
Yes, they work to a fashion, but real world spreadsheets are usually more complicated than these suites can deal with.
Don't think you can compare this to the expensive Transformer Infinity, that has a much higher res screen.
Instead compare it to the Transformer TF300, which has a similar res to the surface and comes with keyboard dock for £379 from Amazon.
Less RAM but Android doesn't particularly need it. Yet.
No Outlook - no thanks
£80 for a keyboard (quality unknown), £19 for a colour - koolaid paradise
Who wants MS Word & Excel (and maybe MS Onenote) that overpriced desperately?
And of course, this means the x86 versions are gonna come in at over a thousand sterling. This pisses me off mightily as I would have wanted one.
Asus Transformer is looking better...
Why would throwing in an x86 chip cost an extra £400?
They're using an i5, plus the chipset that does with an i5, since that's not an SOC. Versus a $15 nVidia Tegra T30. It's a laptop version, which isn't usually for sale and usually does cost more. I can buy a desktop version of the i5 Ivy Bridge for about $215 here. Some difference.
They're also going to need about twice the battery. The display is better on the Pro, 1920x1080 or so. The minimum flash memory is 64GB, they also have a 128GB version. And I'm sure other issues... not to mention markups.
"The rumours were £200 for the RT ones."
The stupid rumour from an "anonymous source" that had no support or evidence and was followed by a legion of people everywhere the rumour appeared saying that it was a stupid rumour. No-one who knew anything thought that anything other than wild and unfeasible speculation.
Well, I'm a developer and I have already released a (free) Windows Store app, but I'm not going to bite. I was burned on WIndows Phone 7. I fear that MS will quickly lose interest in Windows RT and the ARM Surface will quickly become obsolete like my phone. Now if it was £200, that would be a much smaller risk and I might just be tempted.
Too expensive for what you get.
I'm in the market for a fondleslab. I won't pay Apple prices, and the Galaxy slab has a horrible plastic chassis (and is too expensive).
I was looking at the Toshiba AT300 but need to see one instore to check if its flimsy like the Galaxy or not.
Any other suggestions?
That is my #1 bug-bear with tablets. If I bought one then I'd expect anyone in the family to be able to log onto their own profile - meaning they have access to their photos, their emails, their apps. I wouldn't expect to have to buy one for each person given they replace much of the functionality of a typical home PC.
When almost anyone who says they have ordered the device or suggests that they are about to purchase it gets hosed with thumbs it does rather reveal your real agenda, hmm? Especially here at RegHardware where we normally, thankfully, are spared that kind of behaviour. You suddenly pile onto a thread here and start voting in much larger numbers than we normally get on threads here? Who's your publicity/negative-astroturfing advisor, Baldrick?
So Microsoft learned their lessons from the Windows Phone 7 debacle then?
Lets make a [phone/tablet]. Lets make a nice restrictive hardware list, so there are less configurations to code for. Lets make it a halo product, like the i[phone/pad]. Those screens are expensive. Lets use a cheaper one. Lets RRP it at the same price as an Apple product. They sell. We're in Apples league, we're definitely more appealing than Android.
Hey, whys our slightly gimped, new ecosystem [phone/tablet] not doing as well as the mature platforms?!
By the way guys, Windows 9 won't work with your tablet. LOVE US!
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