Microsoft screwed up with the Surface tablet...

[smbu2000]

disolitude said:

 

All you are doing here is marginalizing all of the gazillion weakneses that Win RT has while hyping the few advantages it has and pretending that is all consumers will be interested in. People are preordering it because it looks cool, but they have no clue what they will end up with.  This may hurt Microsoft in the long run actually.

As someone who has had a true Windows 8 tablet for a while(Acer W500), it somewhat pisses me off to see these reviewers bitch about how laggy the Win RT is, how there are no apps, how borwsing chugs and flash runs like crap. Windows 8 running on the lowest specd x86 processor has none of these issues...

In the current apps state one would have to be completely bonkers to get Surface over the iPad if all they want to do is browse and consume content. I was playing Call of Duty 4 and Portal 2 on my Acer W500 Win 8 tablet few months back which the iPad can not do. Sadly I cant play any of my game catalog on RT and have to purchase games from scratch. I can also forget about emulators.  Even spec wise, the iPad 4 with its A6X processor absolutely destroys the Surface and its Tegra 3.

But you say there is productivity which you can do with the Surface but not the iPad... Lets look at that.

The Office 2013 that is included you speak of...well it's missing key features like macros. Also you are not allowed LEGALLY to use it in a corporate environment. Consumer use only. Read the license agreement... So technically I can't even use it for work. And I can't install the awesome Office 2007 on it which I purcahsed for 200 bucks 3 years ago.  Moving on about productivity, it is very fussy when it comes to printing. HP and Dell announced that over 50% of their printers will not work with Win RT. 

Im sorry, but this is not a productivity device.

Lastly no one seems to understand why Windows RT exists. Windows 8 running on an Atom processor does everything Win RT does but better and has legacy support, similar battery life and costs the same (Asus and Acer are charging 499 for their Win 8 x86 Atom tablets).

Honestly there are more holes in Microsofts current Surface strategy than Swiss cheese. What they should have done is released an x86 based Surface first. $500 bucks for Atom $899 for i5. Then 6 months later when apps are there, they should have released a Win RT ARM based Surface...

That or never bother making Win RT in the first place.

Inthe review at Anandtech, they did a quick comparison of the surface (Tegra 3) compared to a Clovertrail (Atom Z2760) Win8 tablet. Hard to really check performance at the moment, but it handily bests the surface.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6385/microsoft-surface-review/10

Maybe MS should have gone with one of those for Surface instead and still gone with the IB one for the Pro for max performance.