[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by rpg.314

On second thoughts, actually a lot of people are using iPad with a pseudo stylus to take notes. Apple might not be holed that badly after all.

I really think that's just a compromise people are making due to no competition at first and no inductive option.

It makes a big difference in accuracy, visibility (capacitive styluses are fat), functionality (hover and buttons, the latter being very useful for erasing/undoing), and it's so much more comfortable to rest your palm on the surface like everyone does on paper. Finally, it's just annoying to have a stylus that doesn't slot into the tablet.

It's no contest. Anyone who tries a real stylus and has any intention of writing notes will shun capacitive options.

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by Mintmaster

It's no contest. Anyone who tries a real stylus and has any intention of writing notes will shun capacitive options.

Yup, when I got my capacitive only slate over 2 years ago I thought using a capacitive pen would be at least somewhat useable. Unfortunately, that isn't the case at all. It's downright horrible compared to the active digitizer pen on my convertable tablet. With the active digitizer I have pixel perfect control and accuracy with the stylus. With a capacitive touch pen? Yeah, good luck hitting something within 10-20 pixels of where you actually want to touch. With some practice I imagine someone could get down to around 5-10 pixels as the margin of random error, but for me that is completely unuseable. And that doesn't even touch on the relative unresponsiveness of capacitive touch pens. Or the lack of buttons. Or the lack of hundreds of levels of pressure sensitivity. Or... The list goes on.

I know a few graphic designers and artists that have ended up getting Windows slates rather than pony up money for a far more expensive Cintiq. And they feel the accuracy and responsiveness are basically equal although they do lose a few features.

I think people "accept" the capacitive stylus for iPad just because they've never actually gotten to use a stylus that is even remotely good.

Regards,
SB

[wco81]

How big is the digitizer market? Big enough for MS to differentiate the Surface on?

Is the pen the main reason people buy the Note or Note II?

Seems like a niche market.

Sure back in the day, people used styli with their Palm Pilots. But the Tablet PC, which is the forerunner to the Surface, didn't really convert the world to stylus use.

[dlm]

Seems like if MS thought that pen input was going to be -that- big of a deal, it would have been in both RT and Pro, but the fact that it's in Pro seems to indicate that they believe it matters to some people. The comments on places like here and various Surface-related articles and posts seem to imply that they are right, to some degree.

[wco81]

I think there are people who like the idea of being able to draw free hand but it's a smaller number of people who actually do it regularly.

When I was a student, I doodled a lot while taking notes, so I guess it would be a plus. But if I were taking notes of a lecture, I'd rather type than write and then depend on handwriting recognition software.

Having the option to do either would be nice too.

Otherwise, I wonder how many students use laptops in their math classes. And of those, how many use a digitizer to write down equations.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by wco81

How big is the digitizer market? Big enough for MS to differentiate the Surface on?

Well the conjecture I'm making is that it will grow. I think there's enormous growth potential in schools. I certainly would have loved to have a $500 1.5lb slate during my undergrad for engineering and even highschool.

It's not just Surface, but rather all stylus-equipped Win8 tablets.

Sure back in the day, people used styli with their Palm Pilots. But the Tablet PC, which is the forerunner to the Surface, didn't really convert the world to stylus use.

Older Tablet PCs were heavy, $1500+, came with bad displays, and had 4 hours battery life max. Atom based models improved some of those points, but were often too slow (single core, slow HDD) and didn't have very good software. Palm Pilots didn't have an inductive stylus, and had several shortcomings that prevented them from being a notepad replacement.

The time is right to start a quasi-paperless revolution for real this time. Apple is going to realize the same thing with their education push. I'm quite sure that they'll release a stylus equipped tablet within 18 months, because otherwise the iPad will have a glaring deficiency on that front compared to the competition. You can't learn effectively by just taking pictures of the blackboard/whiteboard, and you can't draw diagrams, equations, flowcharts, etc with a touch keyboard.

[zed]

I think there are people who like the idea of being able to draw free hand but it's a smaller number of people who actually do it regularly.

personal taste also, on the ipad my gf nearly always uses the pen, I always use my finger

[Squilliam]

Originally Posted by zed

personal taste also, on the ipad my gf nearly always uses the pen, I always use my finger

Good practice. You never know when digit strength might come in handy. I find digit mobility is a great way of sorting out problems in the household which crop up from time to time and I guess your gf using the pen is also pretty good in this respect too.

[dlm]

Originally Posted by Squilliam

Good practice. You never know when digit strength might come in handy. I find digit mobility is a great way of sorting out problems in the household which crop up from time to time and I guess your gf using the pen is also pretty good in this respect too.

I see what you did there.

[zed]

hoho, I also have arthritis, but that doesnt play a part ATM.
the thing with a tablet, is I only use it if I quickly want to look up something on the couch etc, i.e. turn it on (0.5 second), press the google app and tell it what I want etc.
If Im gonna do something serious for 10+ mins I use a proper PC, nice keyboard & mouse etc

[wco81]

We'll see if drawing apps. become popular on the Surface Pro.

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by zed

hoho, I also have arthritis, but that doesnt play a part ATM.
the thing with a tablet, is I only use it if I quickly want to look up something on the couch etc, i.e. turn it on (0.5 second), press the google app and tell it what I want etc.
If Im gonna do something serious for 10+ mins I use a proper PC, nice keyboard & mouse etc

Plug in a keyboard and mouse and it IS a proper desktop. Only if you choose you can unplug the keyboard and mouse and voila, a tablet on the go.

Originally Posted by wco81

We'll see if drawing apps. become popular on the Surface Pro.

It doesn't have to be. It's just one additional use case that makes great use of an accurate multifunction stylus. Something that you rarely ever see outside of Windows slates/tablets and Wacom (or similar) input surfaces.

Desktop publishing, CAD/CAM, scientific note taking, etc. are all other use cases. The beauty of a Windows slate/tablet is that it isn't reliant on a very narrow range of use cases (media consumption) to be relevant.

Regards,
SB

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Btw related to the inputting math with a stylus discussion:
http://www.7tutorials.com/do-math-ea...th-input-panel

Seems there's a general tool you can use unrelated to OneNote too! And apparently it works with Mathematica and on the web (HTML5) as well, so that's pretty awesome

I'm guessing someone must have a MathML->LaTeX conversion utility as well, although I even saw some notes about being able to embed MathML in tex...

[wco81]

Are there no soft keyboards with math symbols?

Or apps which would let you insert math notation from an onscreen palette?

[rpg.314]

Originally Posted by wco81

Are there no soft keyboards with math symbols?

There are just too many math symbols to be useful on a keyboard.

There's the added disadvantage that math notation developed in an era of pen and paper only and is quite hostile to keyboard style input. Symbol based languages (like Chinese) have keyboards for them, but the organization of those languages is different enough that a widely usable math keyboard hasn't been invented yet. And I believe those languages have rules governing formation of symbols and what they mean. Math is also governed by logic but on a different plane. Maybe there's a market opportunity here

Or apps which would let you insert math notation from an onscreen palette?

Too impractical, in my view. Out of the question for something like a lecture.

[AzBat]

Better off using something like the new Sky Livescribe smartpen.

Tommy McClain

[Andrew Lauritzen]

How is that comparable to being able to write on the screen and have it show up where you're writing? Who wants paper at all these days (not me)?

Furthermore just judging by the feature list (audio? uploading to cloud? :S) I have severe doubts that it would be comparable in accuracy, pressure sensitivity, etc. to a wacom.

[dlm]

DisplayMate did a new shootout using the Surface RT, which can be found here:
http://www.displaymate.com/Surface_RT_ShootOut_1.htm

This quote summarizes pretty nicely:
"The display on the Microsoft Surface RT outperforms all of the standard resolution full size 10 inch Tablets that we have tested in our Display Shoot-Out series. The Lab tests and measurements documented in the Shoot-Out Comparison Table below indicate that Microsoft has paid a lot of attention to display performance for the Surface RT. In particular, on-screen text is significantly sharper, it has a better factory display calibration, and also significantly lower screen Reflectance than the iPad 2 and all full size 1280x800 Android Tablets. But it is not as sharp as the iPad 3 or 4, nor does it have their large full Color Gamut."

A few quotes:
"The Surface RT uses Sub-Pixel Rendering (called ClearType in Microsoft’s implementation) that in our tests significantly improves the visual sharpness of text over standard Pixel Rendering that is used in most mobile displays. In our comparison tests, text on the Surface RT was significantly sharper than on the iPad 2 and all 1280x800 10 inch Android Tablets, but it wasn’t as sharp as the iPad 3."

"Our Lab measurements found the Surface RT to have the lowest Screen Reflectance of any Tablet in our Display Shoot-Out article series. The Surface RT also has the highest Contrast Rating for High Ambient Light for Tablets..."

"The Surface RT has a smaller 57 percent Color Gamut, which is disappointing in an otherwise excellent set of display performance specifications. While that‘s comparable to most existing LCDs in Tablets and Smartphones, many mobile displays are now coming with larger Color Gamuts from 80 to 100 percent, which significantly improves color saturation, accuracy, and vividness."


It's a shame that the color gamut is so narrow, although the statement from the article that it's probably a power efficiency tradeoff makes some degree of sense. It'll be interesting to see if the Pro has a wider color gamut given that weight is less of a consideration.

One interesting point is buried in the tables near the end. One category where Surface outperformed the iPad 3 was "Screen readability in bright light." This is one of the big measures that MS was talking about in terms of subjective performance under "real world conditions." The degree to which you use a tablet either outside or near uncovered windows on a sunny day probably affects the degree to which this is important to you.

[tangey]

Originally Posted by dlm

One interesting point is buried in the tables near the end. One category where Surface outperformed the iPad 3 was "Screen readability in bright light." This is one of the big measures that MS was talking about in terms of subjective performance under "real world conditions." The degree to which you use a tablet either outside or near uncovered windows on a sunny day probably affects the degree to which this is important to you.

And also the degree of real world difference between the subjective scorings of "B+" for the ipad3 and "A-" for the surface as per the table.

[zed]

Originally Posted by tangey

And also the degree of real world difference between the subjective scorings of "B+" for the ipad3 and "A-" for the surface as per the table.

and also why is it judging it against the ipad 2 & andriod devices for a couple of years ago, why arent they judging it against like I dont know the (also available) ipad4 or nexus 10

[dlm]

Originally Posted by zed

and also why is it judging it against the ipad 2 & andriod devices for a couple of years ago, why arent they judging it against like I dont know the (also available) ipad4 or nexus 10

It was compared to the iPad3, which has basically the same screen as the iPad4. As for other devices, the article specifically said that it was sticking primarily to other similar resolution displays, and that they will compare the Surface Pro to high-res tablets when it comes out.

[liolio]

We still haven't hear any sales figures for that product, it can only mean one thing...
Overall now that the info have sunk in me, I find some shortcoming for such an high end piece of kit bewildering (in order):
No 3/4G connectivity 8O
Screen resolution (no matter the tests they make wrt that, the pr disaster was written on the wall).
The SoC was on the verge of being out dated on release, ended up being out dated.

As somebody said, I don't know who green lighted that but he must be gone by now.

EDIT
I think that MfA hit the nail on the head when he stated they should have gone with Intel and ship Win8 (instead of RT). Qualcomm capitalization is now higher than Intel (even though I think it a lot of crap and I doubt the market capability to allocate capital of late, not that Qualcomm is not a great company but still). It might have been close to Intel for quiet a while, Intel had intensive to make them a deal, possibly to accelerate some of its roadmap.

[NRP]

I played with an ASUS Win8 RT tablet in Best Buy. My initial impression is that it has a really nice screen and seems well built overall, but it was kind of slow for just Internet browsing and media stuff. I think this tablet had a Tegra 3 in it.

Anyway, I'm still interested in the tablet concept, but I think I'll wait until they've got more horsepower under the hood.

[wco81]

Well Sinofsky would have had the final say on Surface and he's gone.

There are rumors that Win 8 isn't meeting internal forecasts, though they said the first day or weekend was about 3 or 4 million.

It's going to be a tough slog. Sales of PCs were flat or down and corporations haven't been spending heavily. Plus they're usually slow to upgrade.

So it's up to consumers to buy new PCs or upgrade their old ones. As well as buy new RT and W8 tablets.

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by NRP

I played with an ASUS Win8 RT tablet in Best Buy. My initial impression is that it has a really nice screen and seems well built overall, but it was kind of slow for just Internet browsing and media stuff. I think this tablet had a Tegra 3 in it.

Anyway, I'm still interested in the tablet concept, but I think I'll wait until they've got more horsepower under the hood.

I played around with it a bit in Office Depot the other day while I was getting some supplies.

It seemed silky smooth to me. The only disappointing thing was application launch times in comparison to the iPad 3. Browsing, to me, was smoother, and more importantly, less of a bother. Site's with Flash just work. As much as I hate Flash, I hate having sites that use Flash not working even more. Other than that the experience seemed pretty comparable.

In the bright lights of Office Depot, the screen looked quite nice.

It made enough of an impression on me that I'm going ot make sure I have time to put Win8 on my old Atom based slate. That should hold me over while I wait to see what the first gen Win8 slates are like. WinRT impressed me enough that I was tempted to buy the Asus WinRT slate purely for media consumption on the go.

But at the end of the day, I figured why sacrifice x86 compatibility? Assuming my Atom slate works well (reports I've seen say it works very well under Win8), I'll just hold off for a Win8 slate that meets my requirements.

Still, that Asus WinRT with 12.5 hours web/11.1 hours movie compared to the iPad 3 at 12.3/10.3 hours was pretty eye opening (http://techreport.com/review/23813/a...let-reviewed/5 ). Stick it in the dock to make it like a laptop and that jumps to 21.4 hours web (!!!)/16.5 hours movie... It completely blows away anything else out there in terms of battery life. Even compared to the Asus Transformer that shares the same hardware.

Impressive. Almost impressive enough to make me buy one.

Regards,
SB