That is not very good at all. So they could have loads really cheap sooner or later.

Got one. Actually, I had two at one point. MS were selling them to attendees at their recent conferences for £70. Including a keyboard cover that on it's own normally costs £90! I got one for a friend who paid me back, and we've got another one at work for testing purposes. Honestly, the iPads and Nexus tablets are so far ahead of the surface RT it's not even funny. Hell, my first generation iPad was a better tablet than the surface RT.

I have not seen either a Surface RT or Nexus but I have seen reviews of the latest Nexus that show that it is getting better. The iPad is still the one to beat.

I haven't used the Surface RT, it never made sense, you could buy a 'proper' Windows 8 tablet for 50€ more. The price for attendees at Microsoft events made it interesting.

That said, having used the iPad, several Android tablets and a couple of Windows 8 tablets. The Windows tablets are the first ones that made sense to me. They work well as a tablet, yet can be connected to a full sized display, keyboard and mouse in the office and used as a normal PC. There is no need for multiple devices and no need to have an internet connection to sync data in the cloud.

With the Windows 8 tablet, I have a tablet, notebook and desktop in one device. The Windows RT devices, along with iPads and Android tablets mean that I have to have multiple devices and keep them in sync. As it is, I still don't see the benefit of RT. I still need multiple devices, although I must say, I prefer the UI of Windows 8/RT to Android and iPad.

What you actually have is one device that's not as good as any of those three at being any of those three. I bought a Surface pro at the same time as the RT (They were £600 off retail price!) and it's a nice device, but the fact is it's heavier and clumsier with a shorter battery life than a tablet, heavier with a smaller screen than a notebook and has a much smaller screen and worse keyboard than a desktop (and that's with the £100 add-on type cover which is the best one you can get). It is, in essence, your proverbial jack of all trades. It's a fantastic £300 laptop to be fair but for most people it would have been £900, which makes it an entirely different prospect.


That's what 'the cloud' is for.


I like the windows 8 tile interface but the bare fact is once you get out of the standard 'email browsing and social' use cases, it falls down because of the utter paucity of apps that use the tile interface. For example, I want to keep up with the cricket scores at the mo. On iOs or Android, there are numerous apps to do this, with live updates. On windows 8 metro? One app, which is basically just a web view and is smothered with inline adverts. Same with for example podcasts - as I say, there are plenty of podcast apps for iOS and Android tablets. For surface RT/Pro tile interface? None worthy of the name. Windows phone 8 actually has a much better selection of apps, which is odd as I didn't think porting from one to the other was much of a chore...

A tool is only as good as the uses you can put it to. I end up using my Surface pro pretty much the same way I'd use a windows 7 laptop. Aside from the pressure sensitive pen, which is very nice. But I'm not sure I'd pay £600 extra for it.

With the right marketing and price, MS could sell the Surface all day long to both businesses and Joe Average. But the honest truth is they thought they could barge their way into the tablet market without the first clue what happened next.

It could give far more connectivity and usability than it's rivals, but they only made a half-hearted attempt with 8 instead of getting down to how people use their machines. And indeed, buy new ones!

My tablet weighs about the same as an iPad, it has a decent notebook keyboard dock and a desktop dock, which I plug a Natural keyboard, IntelliMouse Explorer, Ethernet and plug an hdmi cable into it to run an external 24" screen, in dual-head mode. It works very well.

The cloud? That assumes that you have internet connectivity.

So what you're actually saying is not "I can replace my notebook, desktop and an iPad with this W8 tablet", what you're saying is "I can replace my notebook, desktop and an iPad with this W8 tablet and all this other stuff"?

BTW, if it weighs the same as a current model iPad, I wouldn't consider the CPU in it to be the equivalent of one you can get in a reasonable desktop PC. At least not if the battery life is more than half an hour. The Windows 8 tabs I've seen have dual core CPUs that run at about 1.6-1.8GHz. Dell's cheapest optiplex desktop PC has a dual core CPU that runs at 2.9GHz. I dunno, but I don't consider 'wait twice as long for everything' as 'equivalent'. They may be a decent ultrabook replacement, but they're not in the class of even a budget desktop PC.


You really think the people making cloud sync systems don't consider the possibility of a loss of connectivity?

They were clearly over optimistic. This could happen to anyone, though they need to look at the whole user experience before they try something like this again.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk.

It runs rings around my iMac and the desktop Windows 7 machine at work. It is more than fast enough for office work.

Then get some more while they are getting cheaper.