Surface Pro Anticipation

Erasmus354 said:
Hahahaha, you are just shoving your foot in your mouth right now. When people refer to a part being a 10W part that is how much power consumption it consumes while under LOAD, not idle. The reason why parts are specced this way is so the cooling can be made to spec.
Click to expand...

Hence why I said "I THINK" because I was not sure. Thanks for the correction.
 
Does anyone have any articles or reviews on the Surface Pro's digitizer and pen input. I have found a patent application on the pen which uses optics and stuff but nothing else.
 
I've been looking for more info on the pen but it doesn't look like there's much out there. I would assume that review units will be shipping out soon since the launch is only a little over a week away.
 
I thought about showing up at 9am at the Microsoft store to pick one up, just not in the mood to wait in line and not even get one.
 
wonderfield said:
You won't need to wait in line.
Click to expand...

But you may have to wait. A million units does seem a lot for this device, I doubt any other Core tablet has ever been initially ordered in such quantity, but that's a full order, I don't know how many they will have on hand when it actually goes on sale. Typically these higher Core devices aren't made in large numbers and they do sell out quickly at launch, but I would assume that there will be a lot more of the Pros than any other Core tablet.

I want to see the Lenovo Helix as it has a folding dock, I like that design overall as it really does turn a tablet into a ultrabook for all practical purposes though the weight distribution is odd with a heavy screen and light keyboard.
 
heatlesssun said:
But you may have to wait. A million units does seem a lot for this device, I doubt any other Core tablet has ever been initially ordered in such quantity, but that's a full order, I don't know how many they will have on hand when it actually goes on sale. Typically these higher Core devices aren't made in large numbers and they do sell out quickly at launch, but I would assume that there will be a lot more of the Pros than any other Core tablet.

I want to see the Lenovo Helix as it has a folding dock, I like that design overall as it really does turn a tablet into a ultrabook for all practical purposes though the weight distribution is odd with a heavy screen and light keyboard.
Click to expand...

That is exactly how the Ativ 700 was built and it drove me nuts. Everytime you touched the screen, the whole system moved. I am hoping the surface will not have the problem since it has a back rest. Helix does not have pen input does it?
 
Andyk5 said:
That is exactly how the Ativ 700 was built and it drove me nuts. Everytime you touched the screen, the whole system moved. I am hoping the surface will not have the problem since it has a back rest. Helix does not have pen input does it?
Click to expand...

I got the keyboard dock for the 500T last week and it's actually working much better for me than I anticipated. Normal tapping on the screen on the 500T will bounce the screen a bit but the keyboard remains steady, it's not affecting usability for me at all. I assume when you mean the whole system moved with the 700T that the keyboard bounced as well as the screen. With the 700T being more top heavy I could see that being more of problem on that device.

The Helix does have a Wacom pen I believe: http://shop.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/thinkpad/thinkpad-helix/thinkpad-helix-datasheet.pdf
 
Oh the Helix! I was thinking the Lynx which is a thinkpad tablet 2 with a keyboard but no pen.
Helix looks awesome, I mean the hinge is ugly but it is functional and has fan's etc in it. I love the 10 hour battery life, I love the fact that it is not bogged down with an atom and ultimatly it has pen input. It looks like the perfect laptop. So again it all comes down to my experience with the surface pro. If I fall in love with pen input, ill keep it, if not, I am buying a Helix.
 
The battery life of the Helix is why I think I'm going to go with it over the Surface Pro. Plus the slightly bigger screen. But I may wait for Haswell. So much to buy, not enough money!
 
Agreed on the Lenovo Helix and Lynx models. The Surface Pro looks good, but the addition of the keyboard dock with added battery swings it for me. Quite looking forward to them all coming out though!
 
Andyk5 said:
Oh the Helix! I was thinking the Lynx which is a thinkpad tablet 2 with a keyboard but no pen.
Helix looks awesome, I mean the hinge is ugly but it is functional and has fan's etc in it. I love the 10 hour battery life, I love the fact that it is not bogged down with an atom and ultimatly it has pen input. It looks like the perfect laptop. So again it all comes down to my experience with the surface pro. If I fall in love with pen input, ill keep it, if not, I am buying a Helix.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my only worry is the price. I don't think we have seen any talk from Lenovo as to the price of the Helix maxed out. My guess would be $2k or close to it. My assumption would be you would almost have to buy it maxed out as well, because I don't think you are going to be able to get at the SSD or RAM.

Will definitely be keeping my eye on these forums and reviews for the Surface Pro too. Hope the display at Best Buy isn't as bad as the one for the Surface RT. They had it so tethered it was nigh unusable to get a feel for it :(
 
Yeah a $2000 Helix would be a pretty dumb move. A macbook pro does almost everything that the Helix does except the pen/touch input. Uses OSX instead of win8 ( pro for me), has better build quality, almost as thin with 15.4 retina display and 8 hour battery life. Yeah.. I am not buying a $2000 11inch laptop that splits in half and becomes an $1800 tablet.
 
Not sure where you're getting a $2k price for Helix. Sure with lots of options and upgrade but the base price will probably be very similar to the Surface Pro.
 
I am getting the 128 model for Lightroom 4. I have small external drives that are USB3.0 where my photos and catalogs will live. I will get a big micro SD card for additional storage. I would like a bigger drive, but I can always do a clean install if I really need more space. I need to find a way to work on sorting photos from the couch after work. I can't stand going to my PC to do this after a long day at work.
 
heatlesssun said:
Not sure where you're getting a $2k price for Helix. Sure with lots of options and upgrade but the base price will probably be very similar to the Surface Pro.
Click to expand...

I have seen more than one Lenovo rep stating that it will "start" at $1500. That is probably without the top of the line I7, 4 gigs of ram and 128gb ssd. If you make it 8gb ram, 256gb ssd and some variance of an I7, it is going to be $2k. Lenovo upgrades don't come cheap. They are borderline apple territory when it comes to overcharging for SSD's and ram.
 
Webhead said:
My thoughts exactly. I'd like to jump on the Surface Pro, but Haswell sounds like it will be worth waiting for.
Click to expand...

I have the RT. Note a super high use item, but definitely gets solid use daily use. Will go to pro though when the haswell variant comes out.
 
Andyk5 said:
Yeah a $2000 Helix would be a pretty dumb move. A macbook pro does almost everything that the Helix does except the pen/touch input.
Click to expand...

The major selling point of the Helix is the detachable screen/tablet with touch/pen input. How can you say the MBP "does almost everything" the Helix does? If your primary need is a tablet with touch/pen input and a full OS, the MBP is useless because it does not meet that.

That's like saying "I'll never buy a laptop because a desktop does everything a laptop does apart from being portable." If you need portability, a desktop is useless in similar fashion.

I'm really interested in the Surface Pro, but am hesitant due to the RAM. How much would it have cost them to put 8GB of RAM in the $1K surface? Why have so many device manufacturers decided that 4GB is fine, even in the higher spec products?

Business users would love this, but some of us do run VMs...

The helix is starting at $1500 and includes 4GB of RAM. Why Lenovo? Are you basically forcing some of us to upgrade everything to get that 8GB? Reminds me of the X220, where you had to pay extra for the i7 (which was not useful to many) to get USB 3.0 (which was useful to many).
 
Last edited:
wonderfield said:
How many VMs do you plan on running simultaneously?
Click to expand...

2 in an ideal situation, but I could live with 1. The problem is that the VM I'm using is a full server stack and it gobbles up 2-3GB of memory without much fuss. It's sometimes used for customer demos so paging must be avoided!
 
Andyk5 said:
Yeah a $2000 Helix would be a pretty dumb move. A macbook pro does almost everything that the Helix does except the pen/touch input. Uses OSX instead of win8 ( pro for me), has better build quality, almost as thin with 15.4 retina display and 8 hour battery life. Yeah.. I am not buying a $2000 11inch laptop that splits in half and becomes an $1800 tablet.
Click to expand...

A mac book pro is a laptop, thats it nothing more, this devices is a tablet / pen input device and convertible. It would be closer to say that a netbook does almost everything a mac book pro does than what you just said.

Second regardless of MSRP companies like lenovo often have high MSRP, even though its still not as high as apple but then prices come down in sales which run nearly all the time. Y580 is one of the best value notebooks on the market at arond $1000 that actually is comparable to a MBP
 
I'm literally salivating at the idea of being able to watch videos in MPC with MadVR and listening to FLAC via MusicBee with this on the go.
 
Heard BestBuys finally have the Pro on display. Need to find time to go over and try one out. A buddy said the pen and screen were amazing... so now I am even more intrigued :)
 
I think Microsoft may just want for people to wait in line for it so as to indicate a successful product launch.

If you want to pre-order one, just go to Best Buy and lay down $50. You can apply the $50 toward the purchase.
 
I didn't expect stellar battery life, but is looping a video endlessly really the standard battery test for a productivity device? Doesn't that sound stupid to anyone else? Isn't it entirely possible that it could hit 5 hours with just regular surfing/typing, longer if you drop the brightness down? I'd like to know the longest possible battery life that is still usable, since I'd have the ability to tweak options given different scenarios I'd be in. Didn't people used to use some program that faked using the PC normally with scripts and stuff (PCMark?)?

I'm waiting on the Helix anyway.
 
Biggest con looks to be the battery life which is as rumored around 4 to 5 hours. Biggest pro is the awesome display though the pixel density can be an issue with the desktop especially via touch. Biggest surprise at least for me is that the pen digitizer is Wacom based, I thought that the pen digitizer was supposed to be Microsoft's patented optical technology but they may have gone with the Wacom tech as that is a huge deal for a large portion of the existing niche that would buy this device.
 
wonderfield said:
I think Microsoft may just want for people to wait in line for it so as to indicate a successful product launch.

If you want to pre-order one, just go to Best Buy and lay down $50. You can apply the $50 toward the purchase.
Click to expand...

^ This. As I was talking to the representative, she was even very unsure if they will have it in-stock on the 9th and keeps pushing the RT on me since its currently available now.
 
wonderfield said:
I think Microsoft may just want for people to wait in line for it so as to indicate a successful product launch.

If you want to pre-order one, just go to Best Buy and lay down $50. You can apply the $50 toward the purchase.
Click to expand...

Wildwhippy said:
^ This. As I was talking to the representative, she was even very unsure if they will have it in-stock on the 9th and keeps pushing the RT on me since its currently available now.
Click to expand...

Microsoft want's to make the Surface Pro launch look successful by selling potential Surface Pro buyers a Surface RT days before the launch of the Surface Pro?
 
The reviews are out. I'll just skip the generic crap Verge/Engadget/PCMag regurgitate and post the main review [H] users should care about: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-review/10

I reaaally wish MS would give an indication of what other possible accessories might be on tap. Can you do power transfer through the magnetic strip? We're all thinking it - the main problems seem to be battery life, keyboard quality and viewing angles/kickstand, and the battery dock fixes all of that.

The information about the screen and pen are encouraging, and while some are complaining that the pen feels cheap, I'd still prefer a thicker plastic pen to the thin aluminum ones other companies have used.

It seems like we're stuck between this and waiting for the Helix. The Helix will be 50% more expensive, and if you've got to wait until April, you might as well wait for Haswell.
 
To everyone who jumped on my post regarding the MBPr versus Helix issue. When I said, it is almost the price of a MBPr and I would buy that, I meant it as a personal choice. Yes I do want pen input on my tablet but I am not going to pay 2k for it. I want a laptop tablet hybrid but at that price range the QM series computing power, build quality, discrete video card, a 15.4 inch retina display and still running 8 hours with massive re-sale value trumps the removable screen and the wacom digitizer of the Helix. $1500 gets you an I5, 4 gigs of ram and 128SSD in the helix with NFC and 4GLTE still showing optional. The only thing it has over the surface pro at that point is the keyboard/battery for $500 and without that it runs just as long as Surface pro does.
 
OldPueblo said:
I didn't expect stellar battery life, but is looping a video endlessly really the standard battery test for a productivity device? Doesn't that sound stupid to anyone else? Isn't it entirely possible that it could hit 5 hours with just regular surfing/typing, longer if you drop the brightness down?
Click to expand...

I agree that looping video is an odd test considering that a number of people may use it in a business setting. A looping video isn't the gold standard here. Anandtech's review shows 3.85 - 5.2 hours on a more realistic workload, which is actually quite good.

If your device is primarily for content consumption I do agree there are much better choices available.

What I find very interesting is that some reviews almost seem to regard the OS (full blown Windows) as a minor plus point, as if it's a nice included accessory or some other bauble. At my workplace we've been exploring integrating touch into our applications, and this tablet is exactly the kind of thing we can carry around for easy testing, customer demos, etc. Running x86 Windows with 4 hours of battery (more than enough for fairly big presentation) is a big deal!
 
obug said:
I agree that looping video is an odd test considering that a number of people may use it in a business setting. A looping video isn't the gold standard here. Anandtech's review shows 3.85 - 5.2 hours on a more realistic workload, which is actually quite good.

If your device is primarily for content consumption I do agree there are much better choices available.

What I find very interesting is that some reviews almost seem to regard the OS (full blown Windows) as a minor plus point, as if it's a nice included accessory or some other bauble. At my workplace we've been exploring integrating touch into our applications, and this tablet is exactly the kind of thing we can carry around for easy testing, customer demos, etc. Running x86 Windows with 4 hours of battery (more than enough for fairly big presentation) is a big deal!
Click to expand...

It not really that stupid, what are people going to do on a tablet? Well alot of people will just watch video all day and night. If there was one flaw it was that the video was not streamed in to push the wifi as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top