http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tablets ... ily%20news

All they have to do is get the price right...

It looks really nice and is probably great to use. Unfortunately it's bound to be more than double the price of a Nexus 7, because, well, it's more than twice goods. Probably triple. I can't justify it personally, but if I could put forward a "business case" for getting one at work then I would!

First 8-inch Windows 8 tablet appears

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-co ... 80-1149236

It is clearly longer and thinner than the iPad. I cannot hold my iPad like that. Though I have to admit that the Windows Surface Pro tablet looks very good. Microsoft should target a segment of the market that is currently ignored to see what traction they get. Though I suspect that the price might be an issue, unless they announce that they will support it for x years regardless.

It is aimed at the segment that wants to be tablet mobile, but cannot get away from Windows.

I find the Windows 8 tablets very good. My ATIV is excellent, as I've said before, and it is the first device where getting a tablet made any sense. The problem with iPad and Android is, you are in a different eco-system to your desktop, so you either have to do without applications you need for your workflow or you need to purchase them twice. With a Windows 8 tablet, you have one eco-system in common with your desktop and you only have to purchase the apps once.

If Android can gain traction in the laptop / desktop world and get some serious applications to rival the desktop world, then it might stand a better chance; although for corporations, that won't be realistic, because they have 3 decades of custom written software that will need to be re-written for Android, before their users can switch.

The same goes for the iPad / OS X crossover. If Apple can do a similar job with iPad and OS X integration, then the iPad stands a better chance of being used in business more. Currently, it is either an email reader or it is running custom applications, such as sales brochures or field data collection (sales etc.) running bespoke software, written for the company, but it isn't a general purpose replacement for a laptop or desktop.

The biggest drawback for corporates with the iPad and Android, is that there is no MS Office on them. There have Pages, Keynote and co. or Polaris Office etc. but they aren't even equivalent in features with the desktop versions of their namesakes (if they have one) and destroy some features and formatting, when converting between desktop and tablet. For a company which has, again, invested decades of development time in automated worksheets and Word templates, there is no way their staff can currently do their job on an iPad, even if it would otherwise make sense.

We had the case this week, where the sales staff got iPads for a show this week, but all of the company presentations are in PowerPoint, with animations. Keynote destroyed the animation and moved all the objects on the slides around, so that the presentations were totally useless. I had to quickly convert them all to static slides and export them as PDF, so they had something for the show stand... My Windows 8 tablet displays the presentations 100% accurately, but it isn't "cool" like an iPad...

I didn't think that all Win 8 apps worked on Win 8 Table? Don't the tablet versions run on an arm chip, therefore making some apps incompatible?

I don't think Android/iOS have anything to worry about. They work differently, and people are using them very successfully in different ways. I know I harp on about him a lot, and I know he isn't a corporation, but if you look at what Fraser Speirs is doing and how he has almost illuminated desktop computers I think it demonstrates that they can work.



What happens when one day MS Office isn't around? OK, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but one day business may have to face the fact that decades of choosing MS has locked them in to dead end.



This isn't an issue about Android/iOS, it's an issue about business. Either the business shouldn't require such features, or should require a more open format. Or perhaps business should just use the right tool for the job, IIRC you work in a meat processing plant, would they consider using the mincer to package the meat? Probably not....

There are two 'surface' systems in windows. Surface RT is based round an ARM chip and will only run apps specifically compiled for it. Surface Pro is based around an Intel chip and will run standard Windows 8 apps.

yes, this id stupid.



MS are moving to a SaaS model anyway. They desperately want to get everyone off buying Office once every blue moon and paying a sub for a web service (Office 365) instead, much like Adobe.


Aside from the fact that being locked into a particular version of office isn't a good thing anyway. If your office has standardised on Office 2010 and someone sends you an office 2013 document, despite what MS might say, you're in a world of hurt. '"Over specialise and you breed in weakness, it's slow death".

Microsoft have been mentioning software rental for years, it has just never really taken off.



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk.

Windows 8 is Intel x86 based, so runs all Windows applications and Windows Modern UI apps. Windows RT is ARM based and only runs Windows Moder UI apps.


It depends very much on what you are doing and who you work for. Working for a new startup, you can probably work from a tablet, a Chromebook, a Windows PC, Linux, iOS or OS X based device. If you are working for an older company, chances are you are pretty much restricted to Windows and MS Office.


Then they will have to bite the bullet and invest millions in converting those legacy applications into something that runs on whatever is around at that time.

They can start producing vertical applications for new devices - one customer has just bought an iPad application from us to do sales presentations and ordering. But it is a gradual process and you can't just buy an iPad and hit the ground running, if all of the documents they need to produce are macro driven Office documents - it is the same problem as switching to OpenOffice, even on Windows, suddenly your whole organisation stops working, so it is cheaper (by millions of pounds in some cases) to continue using MS Office, as long as it is still being developed. Once MS Office ceases to exist and Windows ceases to exist, they will need to look at re-developing that lot.

That is one of the main reasons why Windows is so bogged down with legacy cruft, because organisations invested millions of pounds in the development of applications back in the 90s, which are still being used today, and due to the economic climate and the fact that they are being driven to razor thin margings, there is just no money to invest in re-writing that lot for something more modern, until they are forced to do so through changes in legislation or tax reporting that means that the old software will no longer work.

Just look at Australia, they announced last week, that they wouldn't be changing taxes, because their IT systems couldn't cope with it!


This is exactly an Android/iOS issue. We are moving from an era where documents are stored in Open Document Format, but can't be properly read by applications on the iPad or Android tablets, without totally ruining the content of the files and rendering them useless.

For the iPad, the option is to have them as PDFs or to redevelop them in Keynote, which is limited to the Mac and iPad, hardly open...

Your mincer comment doesn't work. It is more that you have a mincer that produces 1 tonne of minced meat an hour with 2mm corn size and somedoby replaces it with a new one that does 500Kg an hour with a 4mm corn size, it throws out the rest of the production process! That 50,000 Euro saving by buying the smaller unit is lost in lost productivity in under a week!

The iPad is an ideal tool for the show stand, but nobody thought about the fact that they might need to reformat or rebuild the marketing material, so that it can be displayed on the iPad.

That is where a Windows tablet would have won out, because there was no additional work that would have needed to be done.

And that is why Windows tablets in large enterprises could find a foothold, because they can run all that legacy crud, whilst the devs work on producing Mordern UI software designed specifically to work on the new devices. If they had iPads, then for the couple of years of transition, they would need to carry a laptop and an iPad everywhere with them!

I still don't see it being an Android/iOS issue. Otherwise you could say it's a Windows issue for not supporting Keynote files, it obviously isn't, it's an Apple issue.
Part of the problem is that the communities around Open/LibreOffice haven't produced a mobile version yet, perhaps because of licensing, or perhaps they are working on it.
The iPad may be an ideal tool for a show stand, but wouldn't a Windows 8 tablet have been just as ideal? In fact it would be far more ideal as it actually did the job. That isn't an Android/iOS issue, that is poor organisation on the businesses part.

I get that you say how companies have lots of legacy software, I hadn't really thought of that. However, I don't think tablets should be ultra mobile desktops, certainly the old Windows tablets were clunky, I presume (as I have no experience with current Windows tablets) that the same is true - essentially Windows desktop driven with a pointer via a stylus?

It is partly an organisation problem, but it also has implications with the increase in BYOD in businesses.

Open Office also isn't a solution. It does a better job than the Apple apps, but it still renders a lot of documents totally useless. It works internally differently to MS Office, so it cannot display things identically.

The new Windows tablets are much better, many are thinner and lighter than the ad, yet offer 9 - 10 hours runtime. Using the Modern UI side on the move is like using an iPad or Android tablet, then, when you are back at your desk, you can attach it to a monitor and use the desktop normally.