It will be, yes.
Search for backup chargers on amazon, there are tons of 'em.
I was able try out my Surface Pro with an external battery for 2 - 6 hour stints last weekend and it worked fine. The tablets battery was around 85% and the 14400 mAh external battery still had around 50% charge left. It would appear that this configuration is going to work, but should be noted that the 6 hours wasn’t continuous more of a use for 20+ minutes, in standby for 10 - 15 minutes. I did find an external battery, at Amazon, that supposedly will allow up to a 4 amp draw, but I’m going to wait to buy that until I get a better feel for my current setup.
How can anybody take Microsoft’s claims about selling out of Surface 2 when they had to write down a billion dollars of Surface RT?
A combination of folks who were waiting for v2 of Surface (anti-early adopters, Haswell fans, etc.) and less inventory produced? If I was Microsoft I certainly wouldn’t put out anywhere near as many of these things until I got a good feel for actual demand.
Exactly. They just didn’t make a lot of 'em.
I’m guessing Haswell availability was maybe an issue? Just a guess. I have no idea.
What’s sold out? The Pro or the non-86x chip one?
If the Pro is sold out, that’s because it is fucking awesome. Can’t wait to get mine.
But yeah, I’ve come around on non-x86 Windows 8 boxes. With Bay Trail and Intel deciding to un-suck themselves (and attack their own margins…) there’s just no point.
Toldja so!
Dell is making a bay trail atom tablet, releasing at $300. Obviously it will be a piece of shit, as it’s dell, but it would be awesome if microsoft made a bay trail surface 2. Thinner and lighter than an ipad, same ~10 hour battery life, high-DPI screen, and it can run all your windows programs, how cool would that be?
Still won’t be as fast as iPad 5, which presumably will be based on the same 64-bit ARM in the 5s, but clocked higher and with a more generous thermal envelope. I will be ordering three on day zero.
Not very interested in the iPhone 5s, mainly because I want a non-Zoolander size phone with a 5" screen. But Android perf isn’t anywhere close to the 5s on any phone I see, and that’s with all the rampant benchmark cheating.
I used the windows 8 quick ‘refresh your pc without affecting your files’ option last night (somehow none of the visual studio installers/uninstallers would work any longer and I had to nuke from orbit). What an awesome feature! Totally clean PC in about 10 minutes.
The bigger screen size is worth the performance trade-off IMO. I feel like I need a magnifying glass when someone shows me something on an iphone.
I hear you and agree, but performance is my God.
I think the 5s is reaching near-desktop parity though for anything that matters, so there might be a point of diminishing returns after this.
As fast as Bay Trail… and Bay Trail is solid.
Is only a matter of waiting 6 months, for the most part the Snapdragon 800 beats the A6 but Apple releases the new chip in the fall with the new devices, Qualcomm releases in the spring so is expected that the new Snapdragon will beat the A7. Of course every ARM device, tablet or phone, that is released in the fall falls behind the new Apple devices in performance. The surface was especially bad because Tegra 3 was already way behind at time of the Surface release, Tegra4 seems better but my understanding it loses in lot’s of metrics to snapdragon and surely will be significantly behind the A7X.
Given that Bay trail is getting a fall release is probably Intel plan to keep this schedule for the Atom line so I’m curious will the ARM manufactures keep the spring schedule? and Surface will Microsoft change schedule or push manufactures so it can release a surface device at the same time that a new chip is release?
Like I’ve been saying since day one, or at least the start of this thread, windows on ARM is a dead product. Nobody wants it. It only exists because Bay Trail atoms were a year away, and they had to do something to compete with the ipad, by god.
Bay Trail atom is out now and is fast enough for real x86 windows 8.1, which runs all your programs with ARM-like power utilization, and that is an amazingly useful thing. The next atom will be even better-- intel realizes the mistakes they’ve made, and is striving mightily to catch up. Metro still doesn’t have the apps to compare to android, much less iOS, but MS is at least on a positive course.
App selection sucks donkey dicks would be a more apt way of putting it. I struggle to use my tablet since I’m supposed to for PR purposes :-/
I just use the web, for the most part. Apps to me means games.
Hard to imagine someone buying a tablet and not having a passing interest in apps. People seem to love to load up their smartphones with apps. I don’t see that behavior changing once they move to a tablet.
Microsoft needs to attract people who want apps from the Microsoft store. Until they do that a Windows tablet may be limited to people who want to do non-fun stuff like work on their tablets. And yeah, I know there are some, but a lot of people like to get off work and not think about work again as they use a smartphone or tablet at home.
If I want a tablet for fun why would I pick a Windows tablet over an iOS tablet that can run all the cool iOS games?
You just said it yourself about four times: fun means games.
Eh, it’s not even that, though. The Dropbox app sucks ass on W8. The available options for die rollers/stat trackers for tabletop RPGs (okay, that’s technically games-related) are shite. IIRC, there’s no Pandora app (maybe it was Slacker).
Generally speaking, when I’ve gone searching for something on the W8 tablet that I do on my Android tablet (also from work, but the previous year’s model) or my Android phone, I either can’t find it, there isn’t a free version, or whatever is available is awful.
Hell, even twitch.tv doesn’t have an app on there: what I found just opens a browser window to the link of whatever stream you pick -.-
Yeah, lots of people love apps for the games, but more to the point, Apps are (or should be) optimized for touch. There are lots of mediocre, non-optimized apps in productivity and social networking (and every other category) for the Windows 8 touch interface.