One of the major advantages of most Pads is that they don’t use a Windows interface. That lets less computer literate people use them easily.
This will, at best, be a niche for a few businesses that want to try and substitute it for employee laptops. I doubt it will catch on big time.
Neither does Windows-8, except when you want it.
There is no doubt there are a zillion Windows PC’s in homes and in business, and they won’t just go away any time soon.
But, phones and tablets have carved up the market into multiple functional areas and the need for a PC has been reduced for a pretty big chunk of the masses.
It’s the exact same thing that PC’s did to mainframes and mini’s. PC’s didn’t replace them in all areas, but they did take over functionality that didn’t require the more advanced and more expensive features of the larger computers.
The primary/most popular functions are easily handled by phone/tablet/less than a PC devices:
Shopping
Social communication (email, facebook, etc.)
Video/music
Additional note:
Internet access via mobile surpassed PC’s in Jan 2014. So when you say “OS that most people use”, the writing is clearly on the wall, it’s shifting rapidly.
I Really, REALLY like the Acer switch 10.
As long as you look at it as a really nice 10" tablet with an awesome keyboard and not a laptop. It’s a great deal at $250 for 2G of RAM, 32G of space plus an SD slot, and a nice quad core processor.
The only thing really holding me back is waiting for Windows 10 and Cortina.
I’d just like to add as far as the hip/cool factor I use mine in a professional office environment and attend many large meetings/program reviews. At every one I have people coming to ask me about this thing as they are always very impressed at it’s form factor, how quickly it boots to whatever program I want to use and how much they like the cover.
I do agree that MS should package the typecover with the thing, I can’t imagine anyone wanting one of these without the keyboard. FYI the keyboard in this cover feels like a regular laptop keyboard with keys that “click” and have travel. Feels very natural.
I rarely use the pen to be honest as I just can’t adjust to the parallax effect, even if everyone says it’s really fanatastic. I have sloppy handwriting and trying to take notes with the pen makes it worse IMHO. For reviewing/highlighting long ass documents and particularly pdfs there is no better machine than this in my experience.
That would be the Windows that caused more cursing than any of the previous releases, yes?
Not interested.
Yes, and I think the cursing is justified for desktop PCs - they should have kept the start menu for the desktop mode, and added an option to boot straight to the desktop.
For a convertible tablet though, Win8 is brilliant. I’ve owned an iPad and many Android tablets, but I think the Windows-8 tablet interface is better.
For me personally, the appearance of the metro interface is visually jarring and disorganized looking, primarily due to the mixture of pics with text/icons and the mixture of different size boxes.
I understand why they thought it would be good to provide info on the app boxes/icons/whatever you call them, and I wouldn’t have been able to predict in advance that the end result would be poor, so it was worth a test. But IMO, the end result is pretty bad.
I don’t know about the tablets, but on Windows Phone you can make them any size you want and organize them how you like.
<fx puts on Johnny Carson’s old mind-reading turban> …because …you can’t *really *do graphics work …with Adobe tools …except on a Mac.
Drop by a Windows store and play with it, moving the boxes around. It is actually a great interface for a world in which increased screen resolution and size made it possible to see virtually every choice at once.
The Metro interface and a lot of the idea behind Windows 8 came from the more recent work at Xerox PARC. In the years since the Lisa and Mac used their work, PARC has concluded that over-lapping windows were a bad idea, that people spend far too much time moving them around. They have shifted to tiled windows and quickly shifting from screen to screen. That is the really great part of Windows 8 - spending far less time rasterbating, shifting windows around.
If Microsoft had stuck with the Windows 7 interface for 8, and Apple had introduced a Metro style interface, Apple fans would have sung it’s praises to the heavens. Instead, Microsoft over-estimated their ability to sell a truly innovative product to their existing user base.
I use and support both Windows and OSX, and have used dozens of different operating systems. I think Windows 8 has had a raw deal, and hope Windows 10 ultimately retains some way of having a full Metro screen.
Yeah, they went too hard too fast. Plus they (like many current web designs) underestimate how many people still use desktops for web browsing.
In fact, though I have no stats to back this up and I’m making this up out of whole cloth, I’d guess most people use tablets and phones for apps and games rather than straight-up web browsing, and most people use desktops for web browsing and big applications like Word and Photoshop etc. Win 8 Metro really didn’t get that, initially, and got the balance completely wrong.
I’m guessing this thread was bumped by a spammer? Either way, looks like Apple had little to be worried about 7 (and 6, and 5, etc.) years ago. I recall reading articles every year going back almost 10 years that Apple is about to run into huge financial problems because the new iPhone is too expensive or the new Apple Watch didn’t have enough new features or something or another. I keep waiting for those predictions to be correct.