Windows Surface Tablet

[Lex Luthor]

Originally Posted by Xanathol

You can say whatever you like of course but saying 'it isn't really Windows' is incorrect.

Fine. Let me rephrase it. Windows RT is a kludgey stripped-down version of Windows that won't run standard Windows applications, has been rejected by the marketplace, and is already slated to die. If you find a cool Windows app and you decide you want to download it and run it on your Windows RT tablet, forget about it. It won't work. The only apps you can download are the ones Microsoft has ported to the ARM platform and put in the official Windows Apps Store.

Plus, Microsoft has already confirmed that Windows RT is going to die. You're not going to find a whole lot of new apps written for a dead operating system.

Originally Posted by Xanathol

There's no denying that the decision to go ARM vs Atom was a poor one (driven by a perceived need to differentiate the RT from the Pro), but that didn't cost Steve his job alone - he'd been failing for at least a decade. Anyway, this is my biggest gripe about the RT; MS knew the expectations and decided to try to profit off the confusion instead of eliminating it.

All that said, its still a damned good product, which just makes it more embarrassing to screw up. There's really no reason to choose an equivalent iPad or Andriod tablet over the RT other than LTE or some app that may not exist on the RT. Take whatever those tablets do and the RT gives you more.

I suppose which is "better" is really a matter of opinon, so there is no right or wrong answer. I'll just say that I couldn't disagree more with the opinion that you expressed about the Surface RT.

Let's get one thing out of the way that I think we do agree on: Windows a GREAT desktop OS. I use it all the time, and I've used pretty much OS there is. Windows rocks. Microsoft has been improving the product for 20 years, and it shows. It's extremely intuitive and easy to use (at least until that abortion called Windows 8 came along), and the amount of software available for it blows away EVERYTHING else. The Apple fanbois love their Macs and their OS X, but Windows blows it away with very few exceptions. (One of those exceptions is Facetime. Sure, you can do the same thing with Skype and a lot of other products, but Facetime is just easy and intuitive and the video quality is better, at least for me.)

However, in my opinion, Windows 8 sucks as a tablet OS. It just plain sucks and there's no getting around it.

Why? Because the user interfaces for both the iPad and Android tablets are much cleaner and far more intuitive than Windows 8. Microsoft realizes that and apparently fixes a lot of the problems with the latest Windows 8.1 update, but Microsoft is still insisting on pounding a square peg into a round hole. I can say from personal experience that I have NEVER had to resort to doing Google search on another device in order to figure out how to navigate my around in either IOS or Android. With Windows 8, I had to do that constantly the first couple of weeks.

While a mouse certainly isn't required to use Windows 8 on a table with a touch-screen, it sure does come in handy sometimes. A mouse is not an option for iPads or Androids, and it's not a surprise that all of the interfaces are designed so that it would never even occur to you to grab a mouse. That's not the case with Windows apps on a tablet.

If you love Windows on a tablet, that's great. I don't.

Originally Posted by Xanathol

But again, the Dell or something like it is MUCH better.

Finally, this is something we agree on: Dell or just about anything else running Windows 8 Professional is MUCH better than anything running Windows RT. I just don't agree that any tablet Windows 8 Professiopnal is "better" than an iPad or an Android tablet.