I went to the pop up store in West Ed… yeah, not sure we were using the same keyboard. I tried both. They are awful. I will gladly carry a large mech around with me instead.
What I don’t understand is how is the Surface different from getting a bluetooth keyboard (cover style) for your IPad. Like this http://www.logitech.com/tablet-accessories/keyboard-cases/ultrathin-keyboard-cover.
Is Surface’s appeal really that it makes the accessory part of the deal?
In that sense an IPad is still the laptop killer.
I had the keyboard/touch revelation back in 2000 with the Psion netbook (still one of the best keyboards on such a small device). The way it manifested was that I found myself tapping OK buttons on dialogs on windows machines and then sitting there wondering what had gone wrong.
But can you install Linux on it?
Nice article! Can’t wait to have a go with a Surface myself!
For the last 25 years it’s been taboo to touch my computer screen and heaven forbid touch a co-workers computer screen. It was as evil as pressing your lips against the kitchen glass sliding door. Now, everyone wants to touch the screen. Tablets and ipads are great for consumption - watching movies, playing games, and menial tasks such as social posts etc but they should never be a serious tool for production of anything from code, to media, or content and the reason… Leachpad is really the best descriptive term. Lastly, you have finger prints all over your screen which is the reason, for the last 25 years, the rule has been “DONT TOUCH THE SCREEN!”
Jeff, since you impulsively buy HW and since you seem to be quite thorough about it. Have you by any chance considered this Logitect Touch device optimised for desktops with Windows 8?
http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice/touchpad-t650
I’d be very interested in hearing what you have to say about it.
My 2 1/2 year old daughter has grown up with touch interfaces. She thinks anything that doesn’t have a touch screen is broken. I’m sure she’s not alone. For whatever downsides touch screens might have (virtual keyboards are probably always going to be inferior to physical ones) I can’t imagine any devices in the near future being successful without incorporating a touch interface.
Great thoughts Jeff, thanks for sharing. From a business perspective it makes sense to position Surface as a laptop replacement. I hadn’t thought about until you called Surface RT a laptop killer. Tim Cook once said he’d rather cannibalize Mac sales for iPads, rather than have somebody else do it. Microsoft could be thinking the same thing.
It seems to me a major criteria is emerging. Do you need to manipulate text? So far, selecting text has proven to be difficult in the touch world. Replacing the precision of a mouse pointer with a finger has not gone well. Any thoughts Jeff, on the ease of moving words, sentences and paragraphs around?
We use this keyboard htp://amzn.to/RARwZr to go with my ipad / nexus 7 (whichever one we are carrying). Keyboard case is fantastic. Haven’t tried the surface keyboard yet but when its connected, what happens when you’ve finished your mails etc. and then you want to surf or read a book? Do you pop the keyboard off? With this bluetooth keyboard, I simply switch power off…
Any thoughts Jeff, on the ease of moving words, sentences and paragraphs around?
iOS does this best, but it’s still fiddly as hell to select text with a big giant finger. Android, although quite decent in 4.0 and beyond, is still terrible at text selection. Surface (and Windows 8) is in the middle there.
Even with the best touch text selection in the world, it wouldn’t be great, because fingers are just too big for it.
Is Surface’s appeal really that it makes the accessory part of the deal?
There’s a difference between a third party bluetooth iPad keyboard accessory with no real connection to the product, and a first party item that was designed in from the very beginning.
You can be damn sure Apple will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER release an official keyboard accessory for the iPad. It’s the same unnecessary extremism we’ve seen from Apple before: the one button mouse, the Mac that shipped without cursor keys to force you to use the mouse to navigate, the single ridiculously overloaded home button on the iOS devices, etc.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/02/the-one-button-mystique.html
I kept doing typewriting speed tests to see how fast I could get with the touch cover and I could never get past 55% of my speed with a regular keyboard.
I agree in spirit:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/10/the-keyboard-cult.html
However…
Even 55% of full keyboard speed is several orders of magnitude ahead of where you’d be using a full size tablet touchscreen keyboard. For context try repeating those tests with the on-screen touch keyboard. 
Apple already released a keyboard for the iPad, though it’s discontinued now. Not enough people bought it.
Apple already released a keyboard for the iPad, though it’s discontinued now. Not enough people bought it. - Tewha
They didn’t discontinue it -> http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipad/ipad_accessories/keyboards
They did discontinue this one: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/28/apples-ipad-keyboard-dock-case-and-other-accessories-get-hands/
Those Apple keyboards listed on the site are not specifically made for iPad: they are general purpose bluetooth keyboards.
Hello,
In my view all these devices are awesome to browse content. I’d like to see people trying to write code or even blog posts on their iPads. Not gonna happen anytime soon. IMHO laptops are here to stay.
Atmosx:
In my view all these devices are awesome to browse content. I’d like to see people trying to write code or even blog posts on their iPads. Not gonna happen anytime soon. IMHO laptops are here to stay.
Yield Thought, I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode
http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad
How the iPad 2 Became My Favorite Computer
http://technologizer.com/2011/12/05/how-the-ipad-2-became-my-favorite-computer/
Hello,
I found this to be a very eye-opening post that dives just a bit deeper than many of the other Microsoft Surface RT blogs I have read. As a current computer science student, it’s interesting to see ideas in the technological community like yours weigh a new product’s impacts on technology and users. At first I was interested to see the struggle companies have had through the plethora of sizes of phones, tablets, and laptops. Yet when you said “reviewers think Surface is intended to be a tablet killer, but it isn’t. It’s a laptop killer,” I realized that it’s a whole new type of competition. For the past 30+ years, users have revolved around the technology: going TO the desktop to type something, going TO the TV to switch channels. Now technology is revolving around us; our phones and tablets and even our 3G internet/wifi follow us around during the day. As you have said in your other posts, laptops simply don’t offer the lightweight, portable, touch-interactive solution that our tablets do.
Even though the Microsoft Surface may be a glimpse into the future, I would say the tablet needs to improve a lot more before making a lasting impact. I saw that throughout your post, you talked a lot about the hardware of the Surface. I agree that this hardware may very well propel Microsoft into the future, but what are your thoughts about the software itself? Do you believe that Win8 is some sort of “Frankenstein” system that needs to catch up to the hardware? Yes, the Surface may create the ability to have an amazing fusion between touching and typing, but is the software really ready for it? When I used Windows 8 on tablets, I found that it was painstakingly difficult to touch small buttons in corners and menus because they were artifacts of the days of their mouse-based OS. In the same way, I still see the same possible problem with the keyboard. The fact that Microsoft still included their keyboard shows that their OS (as well as many others) may be in a phase of the already but not yet; technology is not advanced enough to transfer our multidimensional words and ideas into bits and binary code. Would you agree that we will continue to need keyboards in the future or side with Apple in that keyboards are unnecessary for tablets?
Jeff, what are your thoughts on the new Samsung Tab - the one with Note capabilities - http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/galaxy-tab ? Is there a future to writing with a pen on a computer, especially for “medium sized” entries (more than a twitter, using your fingers, but less than a few pages of text, requiring a keyboard) - a typical blog reply, for example…
With some minor exceptions, tablets are consumptive in nature, not productive. To get any real work done, you need a keyboard. Period. Full stop.
Once you equip a tablet with a keyboard, then you’ve started down the slippery slope towards and clunky, underpowered notebook, only with a very inefficient (for most real, getting work done, apps) mode of input.
Sure, tablets are flashy, but they are media consumption gadgets - an Internet media spigot.
And in a business setting, much of what you’ll need to do will require Citrix or some other means of running Windows-based apps on the tablet, which is especially cumbersome and frustrating.
Ultimately, tablets are really awesome to have mostly because the companies who profit from the sales say so. They are radically over-hyped and often end up as expensive paperweights.
Canonical has been wanting to do something like this for a while with smart phones with Ubuntu for Android. I think it would be really interesting if they can make it succeed. It’s too bad Mark Shuttleworth and company don’t have the same kind of resources Microsoft does.
Keyboard + Mouse + Touch is the trifecta. They each do certain things best, but none does everything good enough for all-round productivity.
So how long before I can expect to replace my dual 28" LCD’s with multi-touch panels?