I work at a large consumer electronics retailer as a salesperson in the computer and tablet section.
You would be blown away by how many Surface RT's I've sold, simply by demoing Metro on the touch screen, the Touch Cover, and the fact that you can plug in USB devices and has Office included.
People who's netbooks are dying now, and want to replace it with something for their normal light usage love it. The best bits of both worlds.
The problems arise when someone expects it to be as useful as a $1000 ultra book. That's where the Pro comes in, but I've sold them mostly to business owners who are using it for sales and other on-the-floor purposes
I do the opposite thing when someone asks what to buy. I sort them out an older Lenovo T-series with windows 7 x64, security essentials and open office for around 150GBP. Never a single complaint.
Sure it ain't pretty but they work and are cheap and way more functional than an RT device.
Not sure I could live with the inevitable brick wall when someone takes their RT and tries to install some obscure bit of software they've been relying on for years on it (or open university materials for example). That's instant end game for them, resulting in "why did I buy this piece of shit"
I have a Surface Pro and a Surface RT - can run SC2 and VS2012 on the Surface Pro, but despite that I still use my Surface RT far more frequently.
It's an excellent tablet, I love having the keyboard when I need to compose emails or edit spec documents for work when I'm on the go, it has great battery life, the Kindle and Netflix applications are better experiences than their iOS counterparts (on the iPad), and the app selection is actually pretty decent for my use cases.
A few apps are beautiful and smooth, but most frequently pause and stutter (for example switching between inboxes in the mail app locks up the UI for seconds) and few third-party apps use the modern UI design language well. The actual app selection is abysmal. I really want to like the tablet and held out hope that Windows 8.1 would fix some of the underlying problems but it turned out to be minor update in functionality.
My wife's iPad was cheaper, is always smooth and has a great selection of apps.
I have a Surface RT as well and I'm super happy with it. I can do serious Office work with it, work on any file, browser, mail, etc. I bring it with me all the time when I go to my customers to take notes.
Last time I was in a conference, I talked with a Microsoft guy who was happy to see I had a Surface RT. He told me I was the first person he saw at a conference with that device (or a Pro). I was pretty surprised.
I;m very happy with my Surface RT purchase. I didn't want the weight of the Surface Pro and am fine with knowing that if I have to do any dev work I'll switch to my full size laptop. As a media consumption device it's great, especially if you have an existing library of purchased Xbox movies.
The article concludes that Windows RT meets students needs perfectly, but it's hardly surprising since the college's workflow is so heavily skewed towards Microsoft applications.
It's equivalent to saying Mac OS X is an excellent development environment for iOS apps.
Yeah it's partly a byproduct of some schools being slow to change, which is partly from wanting tight centralized control (like at a business), partly from budget cuts, and partly from just being slow to learn new things and not wanting to have to do more work. Our university still uses Windows XP, just like at some businesses. Our students were still in elementary school when XP was released. And we still use Blackboard since before even XP was released. They don't support Apple or Google stuff at all, even when it's completely free (like Google Apps for Education).
It seems to me he is saying "There is a market for Windows RT", for a while there was a lot of people saying "Why wouldn't you downgrade to Android or upgrade to Windows?"
So, universities using proprietary formats (Power Point instead of Libre/Open Office) encourage students to buy Microsoft products. Times have not changed as much as we'd like to think.
For Windows, the Office software suite is far and away superior to open-source alternatives. If you're using them heavily, the amount of effort/time you'd lose wrangling with Libre is not worth it (I know, I tried.)
My mom bought a Windows Tablet. I had just dismissed it before. However, I started using it. The UI was great - fast, responsive and clean. Sure, the app choice is nothing like in it is iOS. But it had all the most common apps and did everything it was supposed to. Who thought so? Face palm moment
In other news, my Windows machines crashes much lesser than my Mountain Lion machine. Go figure.
Seems like a case of that school being already heavily invested in Microsoft programs, and being very hard to use anything else there. This is why institutions and organizations need to open up to alternatives, otherwise they'll always be stuck with using stuff from the same vendor over and over again.
Give me the option to run desktop apps on it (just a few, a terminal, recompiled open source stuff, self-compiled stuff for my work), and I'll seriously consider buying one.
Check out the XDA forums - a very simple bit flip allows installation of any (unsigned) ARM binaries and most open source projects have already been ported/recompiled.
Well, actually, if you already have recompiled ARM exes, you can quite easily 'jailbreak' the RT to have them run. I have Notepad++, 7-zip, putty and a few others.
I know you were trying to say that this should be enabled by default, but I thought you might want to know that it's at the very least possible.
Why not buy one of the Win8 tablets using Intel's Clover Trail?
I have one, a ThinkPad Tablet 2, and it's been pretty awesome for me. (It's the computer I'm using to type this reply. I find the Win8 touchscreen keyboard works much better for me than the iPad's ever did.)
The Windows RT is supposed to be competitive with iPads; i.e. they expect developers to re-tool their apps to work well with touch in WPF and/or Silverlight.
Samsung and Acer has said so earlier, too. And Microsoft took almost a billion dollar hit on it (and probably more losses to come). Windows RT is dead.
I've noticed many of the "old PC companies" are starting to aggressively support Android, and there's also a rumored massive wave of Chromebooks in the second half of this year, from most of the big PC OEM's.
My brother has a chrome pixel and it's pretty much the google equivalent of the Surface RT. Beautiful hardware, few, if any good apps. Google should beef up it's app market or allow existing android apps to be run on chrome OS or it'll meet the same fate. Full disclosure: I have a Surface RT that i love, though would enjoy much more if the app market was more developed.
The author fails to mention tablets with an Atom CPU as an alternative. They cost pratically the same as similar ARM tablets and give you the option of running x86 software.
[+] [-] girvo|12 years ago|reply
You would be blown away by how many Surface RT's I've sold, simply by demoing Metro on the touch screen, the Touch Cover, and the fact that you can plug in USB devices and has Office included.
People who's netbooks are dying now, and want to replace it with something for their normal light usage love it. The best bits of both worlds.
The problems arise when someone expects it to be as useful as a $1000 ultra book. That's where the Pro comes in, but I've sold them mostly to business owners who are using it for sales and other on-the-floor purposes
[+] [-] harrytuttle|12 years ago|reply
Sure it ain't pretty but they work and are cheap and way more functional than an RT device.
Not sure I could live with the inevitable brick wall when someone takes their RT and tries to install some obscure bit of software they've been relying on for years on it (or open university materials for example). That's instant end game for them, resulting in "why did I buy this piece of shit"
[+] [-] Aaronontheweb|12 years ago|reply
It's an excellent tablet, I love having the keyboard when I need to compose emails or edit spec documents for work when I'm on the go, it has great battery life, the Kindle and Netflix applications are better experiences than their iOS counterparts (on the iPad), and the app selection is actually pretty decent for my use cases.
[+] [-] underwater|12 years ago|reply
A few apps are beautiful and smooth, but most frequently pause and stutter (for example switching between inboxes in the mail app locks up the UI for seconds) and few third-party apps use the modern UI design language well. The actual app selection is abysmal. I really want to like the tablet and held out hope that Windows 8.1 would fix some of the underlying problems but it turned out to be minor update in functionality.
My wife's iPad was cheaper, is always smooth and has a great selection of apps.
[+] [-] shin_lao|12 years ago|reply
Last time I was in a conference, I talked with a Microsoft guy who was happy to see I had a Surface RT. He told me I was the first person he saw at a conference with that device (or a Pro). I was pretty surprised.
So where did Microsoft screw up? Marketing?
Maybe they shouldn't say it's a tablet.
[+] [-] jbigelow76|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qdpb|12 years ago|reply
It's equivalent to saying Mac OS X is an excellent development environment for iOS apps.
[+] [-] jackbravo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edtechdev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Guvante|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|12 years ago|reply
It's not like Microsoft invented spreadsheets and slide decks.
[+] [-] isaacwaller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackbravo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kvb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jetru|12 years ago|reply
In other news, my Windows machines crashes much lesser than my Mountain Lion machine. Go figure.
[+] [-] josephby|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinconroy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChikkaChiChi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwolf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randyrand|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Links: "Jail break" tool: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092158
Ported apps: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2092348
[+] [-] rlu|12 years ago|reply
I know you were trying to say that this should be enabled by default, but I thought you might want to know that it's at the very least possible.
[+] [-] pavlov|12 years ago|reply
I have one, a ThinkPad Tablet 2, and it's been pretty awesome for me. (It's the computer I'm using to type this reply. I find the Win8 touchscreen keyboard works much better for me than the iPad's ever did.)
[+] [-] cbhl|12 years ago|reply
The Windows RT is supposed to be competitive with iPads; i.e. they expect developers to re-tool their apps to work well with touch in WPF and/or Silverlight.
[+] [-] bpicolo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edtechdev|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|12 years ago|reply
http://allthingsd.com/20130730/asus-pulling-back-on-windows-...
Samsung and Acer has said so earlier, too. And Microsoft took almost a billion dollar hit on it (and probably more losses to come). Windows RT is dead.
I've noticed many of the "old PC companies" are starting to aggressively support Android, and there's also a rumored massive wave of Chromebooks in the second half of this year, from most of the big PC OEM's.
[+] [-] therobot24|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelwww|12 years ago|reply
I doubt it. I like to remind people that Microsoft historically takes 3 tries to get something right.
[+] [-] Tobias42|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotAgain|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|12 years ago|reply