We're Back!

Yes my Surface Pro tablet/pc has arrived back. Microsoft didn't fix it they replaced the device. In the meantime they launched a Surface Pro 3 at an incredible price.

My Surface Pro is essentially a tablet. A 10 inch screen that is highly portable but does run Windows Pro 8.1. That means you can install Office and other apps and actually use it for something useful. You wouldn't use my Surface Pro as a real PC most of the time. This contrasts with IOS on the iPad and Android tablets that are more single use devices. There is nothing wrong with single use tablets but as it turned out Microsoft make a good tablet. The problem with Surface is lack of maturity as a tablet OS. There is a massive contrast between the tablet experience of Surface and the PC experience. That's why I spent a little extra on the 'pro' edition so I could use real Windows applications.

Although the big move in the consumer space is towards the 'app' and the 'browser' there are plenty of enterprise tools that require Windows desktop. That's where the Surface Pro comes in.

The Surface Pro 3 is a different beast. It is a reluctant tablet. The screen is 12 inches that makes it almost too big for a tablet. However the same screen makes it too small to be an ultrabook. It doesn't come with a keyboard but once you fit one then you can see the marketing strategy to compete with the MacBook Air on price, performance and occasional tablet capability.

The Surface Pro 3 is too expensive for the average consumer wanting a PC/Laptop/Ultrabook but for the business or the pro-consumer that would have looked seriously at the MacBook AIr this may be the pc for them.

One finally postscript. My ssd drive failed on the Surface Pro. I lost everything. However not really because most of my documents I care about are in Onedrive in the cloud. So while it took ages to do the Windows updates my documents were just where I left them - in the cloud. So moving to the cloud really does work.

Link

Microsoft Surface

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Powershell Symlink to Onedrive

Image
I have more than one PC. To be precise, and overly pedantic, 3 Windows 10 laptops. All are slightly different and of various ages. One I use with a Windows 10 Insider Build to keep up with the next thing coming down the pipeline. On each, I do a bit of Powershell . Powershell is the latest generation of Windows command line tools. The Linux enthusiast would look down on the Windows command line of whatever generation but Microsoft has always provided command line tools. In the early days MSDOS was a command line OS. It did little but create directories (folders), copy, move or delete files. It ran “command.com” which some said was just a basic file system manager and way of loading programs into memory. It wasn’t difficult to disagree. Developers brought out alternatives to this such as 4DOS , literally “for dos”, by JP Software . They also produced 4NT, which enhance the Windows NT command processor and 4OS2. The latter was for the IBM OS2 Operating System of the late 80s and ea
Read more

Being progressive rather than universal

Image
Microsoft was not short of ambition for its tiled interface and One Windows strategy . Microsoft was doing what no other tech firm had done - uniting mobile to desktop/laptop PCs in one experience. Apple had two OSs available - IOS for phone/tablet and OSX for its desktop/laptop users. They were different and had different interfaces. Google had two OSs - Android for phone/tablet and ChromeOS for its Chromebook devices. Of course, even One Windows doesn't mean exactly the same OS but it does mean components have such similarity that the interface appears the same to users and, with little modification, apps can run on all platforms. Unfortunately, the app platform UWP (Universal Windows Platform) was hobbled from day one. Microsoft had a poor quality application store, ever-changing developer tools and standards and a Store that only worked (on the PC side) for Windows 8 and latterly Windows 10. While people used legacy versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and XP t
Read more

Identity as the new security boundary

 Not so long ago a PC was safe behind a firewall. The idea was that the physical infrastructure of a network would be enough. Anti-virus and anti-malware products sat on PCs to protect users. Then hybrid working came along. Digital nomads who could connect to networks from anywhere. New startups had users connecting to web based applications. People were bringing their own devices, tablets, phones, projectors and so on into the workplace. Security has now started looking at people. Microsoft call this zero-trust. You don’t just trust someone because they can login. You have systems that secure identity itself. There are three steps to identity security.  1.The credentials that give you authorisation. For most people this is an account identity and password. Often the identity is an email address or some public identity. This leaves the account secured by password. The strength and complexity of the password protecting authentication. 2. Authorization is the next step. What you can a
Read more