MS Surface

I decided on a price reduced kindle HD 8.9 (had one before) and I did the whole rooting thing so now I have a decent 8.9" Jelly Bean tablet. It’s a tad underpowered but will be ok till I can get a new Surface pro 2. I still want a larger screen so I will have to decide on that later.

Is anyone thinking of getting one of the 8-inch Bay Trail devices coming out soon? Dell Venue 8 Pro or Lenovo Miix 2?

I’m sorely tempted by the Venue 8 pro, not sure if it is available in a cellular variant, that would make it a no-brainer for me at that price point.

Tried to burn 1400$ on an 5gb surface pro for my fiance’s birthday. Got burned instead by microsoft’s store and support. Somehow my bank decided only this payment to microsoft was fraud and neither microsoft nor the bank informed me of this, until 10/22. I had contacted ms support before the store sent me any indication, but they were useless and gave me incorrect information.

I have a long angry write-up about it, but they really have a system that makes an impression. Talked to 4 different customer service reps (plus some escalations), none of which are able to retry a payment or change to an alternate payment. Walk into any store and a random person making minimum wage will allow you to pay any number of ways within 30 seconds.

Technologically, their store can’t send an email when a payment is attempted but failed. “Status” will not update to reflect this or any other problem. Your order page will forever tell you your pre-order will arrive 20/21, even after that day has passed. You can’t change your payment method or address by default. An automated email will let you change a payment (but not address) within a certain time window over the weekend. However, the special link in that email will not work correctly and display HTML with a bunch of ERROR_MESSAGES_IN_CAPS_AND_UNDERSCORES. Furthermore, it is a single use link that expires with the first failure.

Compare to amazon or any typical online store, any failed payment will generate an email that can be resolved basically instantly.

What makes you think Dell’s hardware build quality won’t suck and they’ll abandon it within 9 months?

I don’t know about the Venue 8 Pro but my Dell XPS 12 has excellent build quality, especially considering how fragile the form factor could be. Had it for a year and it’s still like it’s brand new, the fancy hinge and all.

Someone got their hands on a Venue 8 Pro and has some really great things to say:

All of our Enterprise PC inventory is with them (200k PCs). I’m pretty sure I can strongarm our rep if need be. Anyways, at that price point it doesn’t matter as much.

Really waiting for more on the Venue 11.

I think an i3 just might be the thing (at least with external HDDs and a dock) to replace my parent’s aging Opteron 165 (Athlon 64 era) tower.

If I’m honest with myself, I don’t think an 8" form factor tablet is workable for Windows, but I’m curious to see how it works out. I do quite a bit of email on my iPad, along with Teamviewer to get to my home PC, everything else is just media consumption.

That’s why I held off getting a Windows tablet until the Surface came out–I just couldn’t see doing it with less than a 10" screen. That, plus I wanted to read comic books on it :)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7478/microsoft-surface-pro-2-firmware-update-improves-battery-life

Still doesn’t compare to a macbook air, but it is a substantial improvement.

Yayyy now it’s actually decent battery life. How could MS ship it with a wifi driver that sucked down 25% of the damn battery?

Why isn’t the MacBook Air 11’’ on any of those charts, they say in the text that is better, but I think the Surface Pro 2 tests should be compared to tablets and to 11’’ laptops but I only see tablets in the charts.

tolwyn, did you ever get to mess around with the Venue 11 Pros? With Black Friday/Cyber Monday I figure it’s time to start collecting info in case Dell puts on a decent sale for them. Anyone else have any experience or seen any decent reviews?

There’s been some noise about the Atom V11Ps floating around since apparently they’re in retail stores even though Dells not shipping online orders. Still missing a large enough contingent to get a strong consensus, though it does look like the battery does hit the 10 hour mark. Still nothing on the i3/i5 versions.

Pen input is apparently functional on the V8P them after a driver update, and presumably so for the V11P as well. Apparently there are issues with battery life and general QC on the stylus though.

I have an order for an i3 V11P due to arrive sometime mid December.

In other news, the V8P 32GB is on Amazon for $230 right now.

Ack, I didn’t realize they still weren’t shipping the 11 pros yet. I see they’ve got at least one option that’s supposed to ship tomorrow, but everything else is listed as end of year. I guess they could still discount them for BF/CM, but not having them ready to ship before Christmas is a huge miss for them.

No, we had our Dell reps in today, we’re supposed to get them any day now. We’ve got the 11’s and the 8’s coming in with all available accessories.

I’ve had the Venue 8 Pro for a few weeks now and it’s basically fantastic, as long as you accept the fact that using Desktop applications will need some peripherals. But I guess sharing my impressions would be better left for a new thread? Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to it :-P

But Bay Trail is pretty much the real deal. Fast enough to run almost anything on the Desktop that’s not super-heavy, fast enough to run some games, and yet for browsing and video playback still get 8-10 hours of battery life.

The ASUS T100 is selling very well, and the Venue 11 Pro outfitted with Bay Trail should be along the same lines.

Yep. The surface RT is on clearance for $180 now. I expect MS didn’t make many Surface 2s.

Stories coming out today suggest that MS will be killing one of their modern OS’s. Obviously Windows is safe, so the choice is between WinRT and WinPhone8. I always expected them to use real Windows on x86 atom for tablets, kill WinPhone8, and use WinRT for mobile since it shares apps with real Windows, but these stories suggest WinRT got the short straw. Kind of an odd choice.

MS is obviously retooling to use Atom in the Surface 3. It can’t come soon enough.

Like I’ve been saying throughout this thread, I understand why the SurfaceRT existed, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why MS chose to release a known loser in the Surface2. The only explanation I’ve got is an agreement with nVidia, but there must have been some heavy penalties in an ironclad contract to convince them to release something like the Surface2 knowing it was going to fail.

But hey, MS does all kinds of inexplicable shit, like live TV integration in the xbone when everbody had DVRs 10 years ago (and are cutting the cord now). Seems like making obvious easily avoidable mistakes is in their DNA.

Oh this one is easy. MS’s IPTV solution is finally deployed widely by telephone companies to take on Cable TV, so they only see the rise in subscribers (you know, from zero a few years ago). They are too giddy to notice all the antennas springing back up on the roofs.