Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 03 Feb 2013 21:37

Mort Walker wrote:^^^And what is your point? Apple will have a patch pushed out very quickly. Certainly faster than what MSFT could do for Windows.

For the 2nd time this month Apple has disabled a Java web plugin because of a security hole left by Oracle.
OSX = Unix. It is inherently the best and most advanced operating system in the world for consumers.

Point is that this is a pretty big bug....

>OSX = Unix. It is inherently the _best_ and _most advanced_ operating system in the world for consumers.

And this...

They have been telling this marketing BS that this is the "best".. "most secure".. "most advanced". There is so much wrong with those claims.. that I dont even know where to start.

"best".. "most secure".. "most advanced".. wont have such silly stupid bugs.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 03 Feb 2013 22:04

^^^Sorry. If you read why this is happening, then you would understand and Apple will fix this. Serious yes, but hardly a pretty big bug. If Apple doesn't rectify it quickly, that is in a week, then it is very serious.

The reason we all use Windows is out of inertia, not because it is good. There were more than a half-dozen serious bugs in Windows 8 when it came out. Far more than OS X Mountain Lion when it was released.
Windows 8 UI on the desktop is one big silly bug. Those of who installed it and used it, promptly uninstalled it and went back to Windows 7. That is fact and reflected in Windows 8 sales and adoption. Hell, even Vista with the latest service packs is better than Windows 8 on a desktop today.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 03 Feb 2013 22:34

Boys...boys, calm down. There are bugs in both platform onlee, equal equal onlee.

Some folks seem to have had a visceral hatred for Mickey, right down to the ma-behen level. Fruit co has that at a smaller scale due to its more limited target market. And now I slowly see a similar thing happening with Chacha. Its as if these companies personally violated someone's echandee. They are all for-profit companies whose primary duty is to make its shareholders rich - that makes them as good or as evil as any other such companies, any fake goody-two-shoes PR notwithstanding.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 03 Feb 2013 23:27

For profit corps do whatever they can to hold and gain market share. it can be completely inocuous. Car companies for example can afford to make only a few "models" which have 10000 tit bit customizations like rubber mat vs plastic mat to make the buyers think that they have choices.

Tech companies are like that too. A portion of decisions are driven by business imperatives and not for the benefit of the users. Their marketing department then take what products they produce and add Gandhi and smiling babies to it (have you seen fruitco Gandhi commercial of old? ) so it is best to not think that you are disrespecting Gandhi if you don't buy Mac.

Regarding whose bug was bigger. Kids who are old enough here would realize how many patches sun sent out for Solaris 8 and 9. Don't even get me started on HP ux. And if we want to play whose bug is bigger, anyone remember the various file copy bugs in vista?

The hope is that there is enough competition for everyone to have a real choice, keep prices low and technology progressing.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 03 Feb 2013 23:45

Yup, Solaris had its bugs as did SunOS before that, HP-UX and HP bought Apollo Computer Systems in the early 90s giving them a platform for HP-UX.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 03 Feb 2013 23:48

Raja Bose wrote:Boys...boys, calm down. There are bugs in both platform onlee, equal equal onlee.

Some folks seem to have had a visceral hatred for Mickey, right down to the ma-behen level. Fruit co has that at a smaller scale due to its more limited target market. And now I slowly see a similar thing happening with Chacha. Its as if these companies personally violated someone's echandee. They are all for-profit companies whose primary duty is to make its shareholders rich - that makes them as good or as evil as any other such companies, any fake goody-two-shoes PR notwithstanding.

I don't have a hatred for any OS, but having used several different OSes, from DEC VMS in the 1980s to IRIX on SGI machines to today, I would say OS X is one of the best out there. Toward the end HP-UX got really good.

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 03 Feb 2013 23:54

My hatred for Solaris comes from that stupid bug in multithreading. You had to put in a sched_yield() here and there to prevent locking up the whole system! Like desis randomly adding chilli flakes to their restaurant food, I used to sprinkle sched_yield()s around in the code randomly to improve its flavor! The best OS for multitheading and parallel programming was SGI Irix. Their Octane machines were quite a looker (and that was before Mahdi convinced everyone good looking machines were his idea -- anyone seen Cray-2 from the 80's?). Sadly, the company is not around -- NVidia and ATI with their cheap cards ate SGI's lunch.

But without NVidia and other companies that produced graphic acceleration on chips and moved it from workstations, we wouldnt have things like iphunwa with smooth buttery animation.

Point is, Companies rise and fall and competition is good for users.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 04 Feb 2013 01:09

IRIX was one of the earlier POSIX compliant OSes available. SGI was hit by mismanagement, cost of system and the eventual rise of Linux. Google ended up buying their campus in Mountain View. SGI had one of the better subsidized gourmet food cafeterias in Silly-con valley in the late 1990s.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 04 Feb 2013 01:53

Somewhere in the CHM's warehouse is a SGI Indy I had rescued from my old college's trash pile and donated to them.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 04 Feb 2013 02:27

Mort Walker wrote:IRIX was one of the earlier POSIX compliant OSes available. SGI was hit by mismanagement, cost of system and the eventual rise of Linux.

That was the killer and mostly the graphics hardware is the one that would raise the cost. Good for visualization but utterly useless for computations, most supercomputer centers using these not withstanding. In our lab we wanted to buy something for $100K hardware funding we got back in 1990 and we were able to get a couple of pretty good (for that time - 64 MB RAM

) Sun Sparcs and some money left over to buy more memory when the prices came down vs. an SGI where they wanted $25K for the base machine with minimal amount of RAM and a lot of money the non-optional graphics HW with nothing left over for extra memory. What they missed is that not everybody needs to visualize stuff and graphics is not end all and be all which was also the Achelis' heel of almost all supercomputing centers all over the world.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 04 Feb 2013 03:33

so, who is the leader now in graphics and workstations?

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 04 Feb 2013 03:40

Graphics in high end still seems to be nvidia and ati. Depending on the cycle one has slight advantage over the other , since their product cycles are not lock step. Chip Z had been threatening to come out with one since eternity. I think they downhill skied with larrabee.

In the "good enough" end it is commoditized with several selling soft cores for mobile applications.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 04 Feb 2013 06:47

SaiK wrote:so, who is the leader now in graphics and workstations?

The high end offerings from Nvidia pretty much. ATI has some internal troubles now.

BhairavP · Post by **BhairavP** » 04 Feb 2013 09:24

^Consumer market or professional market? ATI seems to be the only profit making division within AMD right now, and their 7950/7970 is going neck and neck with the 670/680 from nVidia performance wise.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 04 Feb 2013 09:38

can someone educate me on rasberry pi?

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 04 Feb 2013 10:05

^^^^ I still need to find a good way to deal with the OEM described onn the previous page.

Someone told me to buy from Malaysia rather than CHina....due to higher reliability and less chance of chori of financial data.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 04 Feb 2013 11:14

BP, pro market. Lot of FX companies moved/moving to Nvidia kit (these used to be hardcore SGI customers back in the day and even after SGI flopped).

SaiK wrote:can someone educate me on rasberry pi?

It is a single board fanless computer similar to the BeagleBoard. Good for embedded devices hacking. Based on a Broadcom SoC, ARM11 CPU, VideoCore4 GPU with OpenGL ES2.0 and 1080p H.264 hardware decoder (IOW the GPU rocks, the CPU sucks). In terms of advantages and disadvantages it is a similar hardware setup like the GB N8 phunwa.

Satya_anveshi · Post by **Satya_anveshi** » 04 Feb 2013 11:22

mahadevbhu wrote:^^^^ I still need to find a good way to deal with the OEM described onn the previous page.

Someone told me to buy from Malaysia rather than CHina....due to higher reliability and less chance of chori of financial data.

Mahadevbhu ji,
Just a thought - Not sure how far this will mitigate the legal risk which I believe you are after - one of the things you could do is to ask for any reputable customers that bought the same gear and see if they can endorse this vendor. Some of the larger, reputable customers may have done the whitebox testing of the gear and reached conclusions that may be helpful to you.

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 04 Feb 2013 13:17

^^^ that was useful saar. much thanks.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 05 Feb 2013 22:54

how gizmos and gadgets are related to yell & yum.
http://www.thehindu.com/arts/cinema/sma ... epage=true

so, who is reading this message? does this belong to this thread or LM?

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 05 Feb 2013 23:40

BusinessLine:

Tablet makers bundle apps and freebies to woo users

New Delhi, Feb 5: Tablet personal computer manufacturers in India are not only introducing products at lower-end price points, but are also coming out with free bundled features and applications (apps) to grab the market.

HCL Infosystems on Tuesday launched latest range of its ‘ME’ brand of tablets priced between Rs 5,999 and Rs 11,999 that come pre-loaded with Big-Flix, Cleartrip, LinkedIn, NimBuzz, Twitter and Facebook apps.

Also as an introductory offer by the company, it is offering MyEduWorld 1+1(Buy 1 Year Content and get next year content free). The education contents will be available in the new range of Me Tablets from April onwards. It is also giving Cleartrip travel voucher worth Rs 2,500.

Other tablet makers such as Micromax, Lava, Zync Global and Karbonn have similar apps loaded on their devices. But, would such features and apps create a market for such tablets in the country?

“The actual move is to take wow value of the tablet for media and entertainment users. As these tablets are not getting market position as compared to other high-end brands, companies are bundling with such features and apps for possible customers,” Sandip Biswas, Director, Deloitte Touche Tomhatsu India, told Business Line.

And, just like sub-Rs 2,000 mobile phones survived, he said these tablets will also survive as India is an interesting market and there are buyers for high-end as well as such tablets priced at Rs 5,000-15,000.

“We have apps through service providers such as Big-Flix, Hungama and Ibibo for movies, songs, pre-loaded games in our tablets priced between Rs 4,000 and Rs 11,000,” Anuj Garg, Technical Director, Zync Global, said.

He said bundled services such as data card are not lucrative anymore to all customers as most of these new tablets come with wi-fi enabled. “However, in terms of apps, every consumer wants that,” he added.

Micromax tablet

Micromax’s new 10-inch tablet promises more fun and education to all consumers. Continuing its partnership with content providers such as Everonn, Pearson and Vriti, it has now McGraw Hill as its content partner to create a brand new experience of digital learning through its latest Funbook Pro.

To make richer experience, companies are also offering SIM card slot facility in these tablets, called phablets that enables them to make call from the same device.

“With the launch of the new range, we are aiming at strengthening our portfolio in the phablet category as well. V1 which is a 2G calling phablet and Y3, a dual-SIM, dual stand-by 3G model will enable us to capture the calling segment in the market,” Gautam Advani, Global Head, Mobility Business Unit, HCL Infosystems, said.

Growing market

According to IDC India, the country has a total market of 8.44 lakh tablets during the July-September quarter 2012, led by Samsung with 1.86 lakh units sold, followed by Micromax and Apple at 1.68 lakh and 93,000 units sold in the period.

But, according to some analysts, it is difficult to say whether this trend would continue in long run or not.

“It is too early to say if it is going to be a continued trend in future by low-cost tablet manufacturers. But, they have to come up with such bundled services to attract the market,” Manasi Yadav, Senior Market Analyst – mobiles and tablets, IDC India, said.

sampat · Post by **sampat** » 06 Feb 2013 01:26

Installed Windows 8 pro on desktop. It's not all bad. In fact, I like the new metro interface. Start button is replaced with big metro screen.
Boot time is quite fast even little better than my Linux mint box. Good integration with skydrive and office live. Search is also lot better, you can search for programs, settings, files in dropbox and skydrive...basically anything. Overall, very positive experience so far..

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 06 Feb 2013 01:51

Don't shoot - I am only the messenger. Start the firefight only after I get out of the way.

This is more of a desktop related article though. Don't know where to put. Seems like a balanced article.
Windows 8 Outlook: Murky At Best

...
Net Applications tracks usage data from 40,000 websites and 160 million unique visitors, meaning the statistics it collects aren't strict market share reports so much as reflections of user activity. Nevertheless, the numbers provide a snapshot into which platforms are gaining or losing steam.

Windows 7 led the pack in January with 44.48% of monitored activity, down slightly from 45.11% in December. Windows XP was second with 39.51% and Windows Vista, now in its twilight, was a distant third at 5.25%. Mac OS X 10.8 and Windows 8 rounded out the top five with 2.44% and 2.26%, respectively.

Overall, Windows platforms accounted for 91.5% of tracked traffic. The three most recent OS X releases aggregately achieved 6.4%, with Linux and other niche operating systems accounting for the remaining 2.1%.
...

OS X is a distant second and Linux has to cover a lot of ground before anybody claims the year of the Linux Desktop.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 06 Feb 2013 02:49

Some more useless gizmos - now for the kitchen...

Cooking up the connected kitchen

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Feb 2013 02:50

Windows 8 in its current form is very unlikely to be adopted in the corporate world, where XP is still popular, and will only see more usage in the consumer world as desktops and laptops will be bundled with it when sold.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Feb 2013 03:30

Corporates are moving to Win7 now so I don't expect them to switch to Win8 en-masse (that is a lot of machines!). Win8 will trickle in as and when they bulk order new machines. One of the reasons for the long legacy tail is just the huge number of machines which run on Windows. In the mobile world, Android faces a similar problem despite mobile device lifecycle being much shorter than a PC, with ~45% Android phones still running Gingerbread even today.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Feb 2013 07:13

Nice idea by a asus.. A usb stick sized wifi router for forty dollars...good for road warriors and high mobility types
http://www.techiediy.com/asus-pocket-ro ... al-routers

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Feb 2013 07:40

^^This has been available from chipanda alibaba types for 2-3 years now.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Feb 2013 07:46

yeah no doubt but with them you can never be sure if its just a couple wires and a wad of glue stuck inside as the famous USB mem stick photo shows

asus kit is good, should last.

I used to have a huawei dsl model through BSNL for a couple yrs in 2005-06. after shifting to airtel. I took it apart...lo and behold the single PCB inside was not even screwed to the case with gaps to permit airflow but stuck with two blobs of glue to one side of the case....no wonder it used to be quite hot...hotter than the "beetel 220BX" from airtel that has worked flawlessly for 6 yrs now!!

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Feb 2013 08:05

Microsoft Surface Pro review from TheVerge

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Feb 2013 10:30

^^^They gave it 7.5/10. The latest iPad gets 9.3/10 and Nexus 10 8.3/10. Battery life hurts the Microsoft Pro along with its poor ergonomic design. It is basically a laptop replacement and less of a lightweight tablet.

I predict it goes the way of the Microsoft Kin and Zune.

It's really tough to use on anything but a desk, and the wide, 16:9 aspect ratio pretty severely limits its usefulness as a tablet anyway. It's too big, too fat, and too reliant on its power cable to be a competitive tablet, and it's too immutable to do everything a laptop needs to do. In its quest to be both, the Surface is really neither. It's supposed to be freeing, but it just feels limiting.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Feb 2013 11:54

gah! Yahoo mail has gone to the dogs

- wtf is it popping an ad every 60 seconds asking me if I want a $2.- paid version with more space to see e-mails?! Then it logged me out involuntarily and after I enter the passwd again, the login button (or pressing enter) doesn't work

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 06 Feb 2013 12:17

Mort Walker wrote:^^^They gave it 7.5/10. The latest iPad gets 9.3/10 and Nexus 10 8.3/10. Battery life hurts the Microsoft Pro along with its poor ergonomic design. It is basically a laptop replacement and less of a lightweight tablet.

1) Its thinner and lighter than Macbook Air, just as thin/heavy as 1st gen iPad...
2) Battery life is similar to Air.
3) Costs+does all that Air does, while still having all the features of a tablet+wacom digitizer.
4) Have full size usb 3.0 and mini displayport.

It's really tough to use on anything but a desk, and the wide, 16:9 aspect ratio pretty severely limits its usefulness as a tablet anyway. It's too big, too fat, and too reliant on its power cable to be a competitive tablet, and it's too immutable to do everything a laptop needs to do. In its quest to be both, the Surface is really neither. It's supposed to be freeing, but it just feels limiting.

I cannot figure out why it would be tough to use something that is as thick and weighs as much as original iPad.. as tablet. And speaking of aspect ratio, Windows 8/RT are made around this aspect ratio and are supposed to be used in landscape mode. Also all the metro apps are made for this aspect ratio, so why would it limit its usefulness ? Lastly, what can't it do that laptops are supposed to do ?

This is what online tech journalism is all about.

Mort Walker wrote:I predict it goes the way of the Microsoft Kin and Zune.

It is supposed to do following things:

1) Raise average selling price of PCs.
2) Make money
3) Force PC makers to sell signature PCs. (means no bloatware)

I remember reading somewhere that Surface have generated around $300 million in revenue. The fact people paid USD ~600-700 for a product that is a) expensive b) can't run legacy apps c) does not have too many Metro apps.. is a success already. There is a good reason why they are opening more and more Microsoft stores... they have a product that will soon generate ~1 Billion in revenue.

This is neither zune or kin, expect Sufraces with haswell and baytrail very soon.

anmol · Post by **anmol** » 06 Feb 2013 13:09

I knew that 1080p display would be Surface Pro's biggest weakness, and it apparently is :

And now we get to the Surface Pro feature that, curiously, has proven the most problematic for me. It’s going to surprise you, perhaps. It’s the screen.

You may know that Surface RT comes with a 1366 x 768 screen, a reasonable resolution for a 10.6-inch screen, ideal for the Metro environment and compatible with the (nearly-useless) “snap” feature which lets you tile two Metro apps side-by-side in very limited ways on-screen. And you may know that Surface Pro comes with a “full HD,” or 1920 x 1080 screen. And given this information, you may assume that the higher-resolution Surface Pro is automatically “better” than that of the comparatively low-resolution Surface RT.

You would be incorrect. If anything, the full HD screen used by the Surface Pro is in fact this product’s biggest design flaw. And I wish Microsoft would consider releasing a version of Surface Pro that dispenses with this screen and uses the 1366 x 768 Surface RT screen instead.

Blasphemy, you say? Allow me to explain.

Both Surface RT and Surface Pro sport 10.6-inch ClearType displays with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Surface Pro’s screen has two attributes that I suppose are technically superior: 10 touch points vs. 5 on the Surface RT, and the separate touch and pen digitizer layers on the Pro unit that enable pen use and an admittedly cool palm block technology that lets you write on the screen without triggering touch events with your hand.

You’d think that the full HD display in the Surface Pro would offer one benefit in the Metro environment: That Text would be clearer, thanks to the ClearType sub-pixel rendering technologies that can take advantage of the extra detail. But that’s not the case at all. In numerous side-by-side comparisons, I couldn’t see a lick of difference in Metro apps. The text on both Surface RT and Surface Pro is identically clear and crisp. Literally identical.

Beyond that, you get the exact same Start screen layout, too, with just three rows of tiles. That’s because Metro’s pseudo-resolution-independence takes screen size into account, not just the resolution. Looking at the Start screens on the Surface Pro and Surface RT side-by-side, you cannot tell the difference at all.

So 1080p offers no advantages in Metro. What about the desktop?

Sadly, the full HD display really falls apart on the Windows desktop, which is otherwise one of Surface Pro’s biggest strengths. Text, icons, and other on-screen elements are far too small to be useful at the default, 100 percent desktop scaling. It’s like viewing the desktop from space. So Microsoft actually ships Surface Pro with desktop scaling set to 150 percent. This skews some on-screen elements a bit, but the overall effect is that it makes the desktop seem like a 1366 x 768 display in that on-screen elements—icons, text, and so on—are now readable and even somewhat tappable with a finger. This seems like an OK idea, and it actually is, assuming you never need to dock the device or use it with an external display. (And in that case, why not just leave it at a native resolution of 1366 x 768?)

See, that’s where it all falls apart.

That 150 percent scaling is fine for the tiny 10.6-inch Surface Pro screen. But on a desktop display, like the 27-inch 1920 x 1080 Planar screen I use, the result is a Fisher Price disaster, with gigantic on-screen elements. And because the Windows desktop is so utterly useless at this sort of thing, there’s no way to set the scaling differently for each display. So you can choose between tiny on-screen elements on Surface or gigantic on-screen elements on the external display. There’s no happy middle ground—trust me, I’ve spent hours on this, and it is not easy or quick to change this setting if you move between your desk and a Surface-only mobile configuration.

It gets worse. The desktop’s lack of technical smarts also means that all of the application windows you use will be resetting and resizing every single time you move between your desktop and that on-the-go configuration. Every single time. Every. Single. Time.

Did I mention this happens every single time? Allow me to repeat that because it is really annoying. Really. Annoying.

Now, maybe you intend to use Surface Pro without an external display. And that’s neat. But why would you ever need a 1080p resolution on such a tiny screen? It’s not ideal in that configuration at all.

But if you want to use Surface Pro with an external display be prepared for frustration. And get used to accessing the Display control panel—and moving and resizing your windows—again and again and again. Anyone who uses a laptop today with a desktop dock and an external display knows what I’m talking about. This is just a lackluster configuration, thanks to a legacy Windows feature that we all know will never be fixed.

And to be clear, Microsoft claims that Surface Pro is ideal for this dual use scenario. “For the millions of professional desktop users out there, people who use their PC every day to design and to create things, this [Surface with Windows 8 Pro] is a great choice for you,” Microsoft’s Michael Angiulo said at the Surface announcement last June.

That’s debatable. But I have adapted to using it in this way, and as I noted up front, I’ve replaced both my desktop tower PC and my regular-use Ultrabook with this one device. It’s not ideal. But after a lot of futzing around with settings, and using just about every possible combination of desktop scale settings, I’ve settled on simply keeping the scale at 125 percent. On the desktop display, I put up with some almost silly-huge UI elements, especially in File Explorer and IE. And on the Surface Pro, I put up with small UI elements in applications like Chrome and Photshop that couldn’t care less about desktop scaling. But I would caution any true Windows power users about this kind of set up. It’s very much a compromise.

source: http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/micro ... pro-review

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 06 Feb 2013 18:34

nobody has seen it fit to comment on the $900 price tag of the ipad with 128gb storage

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Feb 2013 21:43

Singha wrote:nobody has seen it fit to comment on the $900 price tag of the ipad with 128gb storage

Blasphemy!

You dare question a priceless jewel like the iPad! 1000 canes to your mush!

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Feb 2013 22:29

anmol wrote: 1) Its thinner and lighter than Macbook Air, just as thin/heavy as 1st gen iPad...
2) Battery life is similar to Air.
3) Costs+does all that Air does, while still having all the features of a tablet+wacom digitizer.
4) Have full size usb 3.0 and mini displayport.

1. The Surface Pro is 25% heavier than the 1st gen iPad with 3G. 910g > 730g. What is the Surface Pro? IS MSFT marketing it as a tablet or laptop, it isn't clear at all? Its too expensive for tablet and its too small for a laptop. The MBA and and better Ultrabooks at 11.6" screens border on being unusable especially when using Office, the Surface has a 10.6" screen that is more suited for a tablet. Having used the Surface RT, it is hard to hold and use as a tablet. The sharp edges and weight distribution make it uncomfortable to hand-hold for any significant period of time. The Surface is best used like a laptop on a desk, even in the lap it is a PITA.

2. No the MBA has 5 hours and the 13.3" MBA is 7 hours.

3. No it does not replace an MBA. The 11.6" MBA with 128 GB storage is $1100, the Surface Pro is $1030 for 64 GB storage. The MBA can simultaneously drive a 2560x1600 monitor and its own 1366x768 display, and has a better keyboard (back-lit, larger and better feel). The Surface Pro does replace the iPad, but at higher cost and lack of portability. Finally, the Surface Pro can not run Windows and OS X.

4. The Surface Pro does not have DNLA, like some Android tablets, or anything like Apple's Airplay for the iPad or Mac. The MBA has USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt (which the Surface Pro lacks). The Surface Pro has a variety of sensors which is nice and is missing in all other popular laptops.

anmol wrote: I remember reading somewhere that Surface have generated around $300 million in revenue. The fact people paid USD ~600-700 for a product that is a) expensive b) can't run legacy apps c) does not have too many Metro apps.. is a success already. There is a good reason why they are opening more and more Microsoft stores... they have a product that will soon generate ~1 Billion in revenue.

At $300 million revenue on the Surface means MSFT would have to sell 500,000 since it was introduced late October 2012. Maybe, but I doubt it. Last I read as of January it was 233,000 units. I would say MSFT is losing money on the Surface, but they are sort of like TSP on western aid. Always predicting gloom and doom, but MSFT survives due to Windows and Office entrenched in the workplace.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Feb 2013 22:29

Raja Bose wrote:
Singha wrote:nobody has seen it fit to comment on the $900 price tag of the ipad with 128gb storage
Blasphemy! You dare question a priceless jewel like the iPad! 1000 canes to your mush!

To compete with the Surface Pro, but at least you get more than 83 GB!

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Feb 2013 22:45

Mort Walker wrote:Always predicting gloom and doom, but MSFT survives due to Windows and Office entrenched in the workplace.

Don't all companies survive like that?

Each has its entrenched cash cows which enables it to dabble in other ventures. Mickey has its Windoze, Office, XBox, Server & Tools; Chacha has his ads (& search), Fruit Co. has its iPhunwas and iPads. Innovation in technology and making money off it are two totally different things. Usually the technology innovator loses out on the money making part (no the Mahdi didn't invent touchscreen phones, multi-touch or even multi-touch on phones

). It is part of the innovator dial-e-amma.

Mort Walker wrote: To compete with the Surface Pro, but at least you get more than 83 GB!

Yeah but I can't do work on my iPad either. Having used (and still using) the Surface when I travel or go offsite, it does feel like a compromise device - neither a tablet nor a laptop (refer to this dhaaga some pages back. Reviewers could have just read this dhaaga and xerox-khan'ed it to save time

). But that also means I have to carry one device, instead of two. And infinitely easier to handle than a laptop when going thru airport madness. Unfortunately most reviewers nowadays do tend to amplify stuff which may not matter in day to day use. Whoa! 336 ppi onlee as compared to 408 ppi !!!UNUSABLE!!!JEEHAAARD!!! Its an unconscious aping of the Mahdi's way just like airline pilots unconsciously ape Chuck Yeager when speaking in their measured drawl over RT.

BTW the Surface also drives an external display thru its mini DisplayPort connector. Its funny that Engadget complained about the "noisy" fan of the Surface Pro even though the MacBook Air is way noisier (& they loved how quiet it was).

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 06 Feb 2013 22:55

When haswell becomes mainstream and M$ integrates it, size and battery life will improve. The tablet is fantastic for a first iteration . I am sure they will improve as time goes on.

Fruitco had the advantage that they introduced a tablet as a new category and nobody asked for compatibility with old applications. M$ is positioning as a converged device. So they have to go for higher specs to ensure legacy compatibility.

As we all know, processors get faster and more battery efficient. M$ can ride it again as they did in the past.