The Guardian Technology Blog’s Matthew Baxter-Reynolds calls Microsoft’s forthcoming Surface “a post-PC tablet done right to compete effectively against the iPad.
So why, he asks, did ‘tablets’ on show at IFA 2012 look so much like adapted netbooks?
Baxter-Reynolds notes that Samsung Ativ, a Windows 8 RT tablet, was the only one of 11 OEM tablets shown off at IFA 2012 without a keyboard as standard, and now that Windows 8 is ready with its magical reimagined touchable-ness, “instead of kit worthy of Windows 8, we get a bunch of revamped netbooks, a technology the market rejected around the same time its love affair with the iPad started… three Windows RT devices, and eight Windows 8 devices, ten of them… irrevocably meshed together with the idea of the keyboard,” and that, he says, positions them as netbooks.
What’s not clear to Baxter-Reynolds is why people think Windows 8 running on something that looks like an iPad should suddenly become a clamshell laptop, contending that you don’t need to choose between a real computer or an iPad – you likely need both – and what the OEMs demonstrated at IFA 2012 is that they just aren’t with the program.
For the full commentary, visit:
http://bit.ly/OPhd7z
