Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Play with Surface in Best Buy or Staples and see for yourself

Now you can play with an actual Microsoft Surface machine at Staples or Best Buy. See here.

This is Microsoft's last hope of being relevant in modern computer/tablet market... and ALAS I am not thrilled with it.

First it is kind of a heavy rectangular block with an odd dimension. Not as nimble as the Kindle or other tablets. A first look of it tells me it isn't even looking as good as other Android tablets in the store. This is intended for landscape view only, not portrait. Even a $1 photo frame can hold a picture in 2 ways but the stand doesn't do that, and the screen doesn't turn 90 degree when you turn it around. Ok, that's fairly minor. But I would imagine it will be hard to read a PDF novel on this thing.

Ok, more about Windows 8 itself later. It needs at least a few things to become less annoying...

The keyboard! Yikes it doesn't feel good. I am afraid the virtual keyboard of the IPad works better. It doesn't click like a real keyboard should do. But there is another one in the store that feels better. Alas, you have to pay extra ~$150 for that?! This is overpriced. How can you be competitive that way?

The Metro interface... doesn't work so well with the traditional desktop, which is now a hard-to-find icon on the tiles. This is poor replacement for the good old Start button. Sorry, this won't fly. I am sure that Palm WebOS thing and the Blackberry thing work a lot better and they didn't fly either.

Microsoft is going to be LESS relevant... The reign will soon be over as alas, soon people will get used to some oddity of the Mac and switch when their Windows 7 machines grow old.

Microsoft has been a formidable company... In the past it won against Wordperfect, Netscape, even Sony and Nintendo on gaming consoles... but sadly they will LOSE because they chose idiot Metro interface and can't design a better tablet.

1 comment:

Alex Mak said...

Too little too late. These Surface devices should have um, surfaced with the Windows 8 launch. I played with one at Staples and was not impressed, Kindle Fire and Nexus were more attractive. The tiles are nonsensical and counter-intuitive. Microsoft has proven that it can't beat by copy anymore. Windows 8 will join Zune into obscurity.