Another Look at Microsoft’s Canceled Surface Mini

[Megalith]

Evan Blass has leaked another image of Microsoft’s fabled Surface Mini: the miniaturized tablet never saw the light of day and was canceled back in 2014. A specifications list confirms that it would have ran Windows RT 8.1 and incorporated a 7.5” 1440x1080 display and Qualcomm MSM 8974 CPU.

 

[westrock2000]

Probably would have been a quality device has MS not crippled RT from the start. They never loved RT, never treated it like one of their own. It grew up feeling abandoned and unloved. No surprise it's life was cut short. If only people would have given it a chance they would have seen how much better it was compared to ChromeOS. Little guy tried so hard.

 

[Hallucinator]

Microsoft seems to have a tendency to abandon their toys so easily while Apple is good at those stuffs - they stay bit or more longer than that.

 

[mvmiller12]

In my opinion, of course, Windows RT would have fared a lot better if it's built-in Office 2013 had full VBA support enabled (ignoring the horrible and confusing marketing it received, of course). My understanding is that that was all ported to RT as well, but deliberately disabled to prevent people from making any kind of homegrown app that worked outside of the app store.

I've picked up Surface RT and later, the Surface 2 (RT) for my wife for her college schoolwork. Both machines are perfect for that sort of thing - good battery life, durable, fast enough, MS Office and OneDrive integration, easy-to-use Web Browser with Flash support... and unlike her desktop, it was largely impervious to malware. The admittedly faster Nokia Lumia 2520 tablet I replaced the Surface 2 with was unfortunately a lot less durable. It lasted 4 months before she shattered the screen on it and now she is back on the Surface 2 .

Personally, I wish MS had opted to port their ARM version of Windows 10 Mobile over to it - the Windows 8(.1) app store never really materialized as promised, but things have gotten a lot better in there with Windows 10 UWP apps.