Which keyboard is better

Being a tech professional forces me to read a lot of articles and reviews about this field  but to find at least one written or captured on camera by a very young girl is really unlikely. This is the reason why this one got my attention She deserves a MVP Award!!

The new Surface

Today Microsoft has announced the new Surface. Both, the PRO and the now just Surface have been refreshed obtaining more battery life and performance. The PRO is getting a docking station that converts this machine in a workstation. The cover keyboard has been also redesigned now with backlit and more touch points, a lot more, up to the point that now you can use gestures on it. Both machines have been updated with Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 RT. The price in both 2 versions is a little bit lower than the initial price from last year release.



The whole event can be seen here

New update for RT and PRO

Microsoft released yesterday a new update for both versions of the Surface. According to some reports the update has fixed issues with WiFi Limited connectivity. The update is available using Windows Update.

And the updates keep coming

It's good to see how Microsoft keep updating individual Apps that are part of the OS such as Mail, Calendar and People. And this is something that differentiate the update process from Microsoft to the one from Apple were everything comes in the shape of firmware updates.

In todays update a lot of improvements were done and more details about them can be found here.  Another good news was posted at Surface Blog. Panos Panay acknowledged the Limited Connectivity Issue in Surface RT and the lack of pressure functionality in Adobe Photoshop with Surface Pro and expressed Microsoft's commitment to fix these issues.

Still, it's the best

My previous posts have been written trying to show why I think that Microsoft's effort should be directed to fix current issues with the Surface RT instead of rushing to release the PRO thinking about it as the money maker. The money maker is the one on this video:

The high risk behind the Surface PRO

TabletPC have been in the market close to 10 years and it has been extremely popular with just a small portion of the market. I have been using them and I love them but when Apple released the iPad showed the world why TabletPC never gained in popularity. TabletPC were heavy, they were most of the time slow and the battery life on them never passed the 4 hours barrier. The iPad in another hand were not heavy, software run fast and the battery life was more than 10 hours.

Now, let's check the Surface PRO, it's not that heavy, but UMPC were not and they were not a lot more popular than TabletPCs, we do not have any elements to judge the speed of it but we can say that it uses an i5 processor which have not impressed me personally at all, you will find applications like iTunes taking a long time to load and do anything. And the battery life is between 4 to 5 hours. Sorry, but nothing classifies closer than this to a TabletPC. The Surface PRO is a TabletPC.

Now, the question that I have in my mind this whole time is, what the heck is making MS believe that they will be able to retake the old concept and make it popular this time?

Why being a TabletPC fan I selected the RT over the PRO? Because of the processor, the RT performance and the battery life.

The ARM processor runs virtually cool, there is not any need for a fan or extra heat dissipation. I wonder how this issue was resolved in the Surface PRO but I can tell you one thing, the Surface PRO will never run cooler than the RT. That's for sure. And if a fan was needed then there will be some noise. We can speculate about how optimized is the OS in the Surface PRO to make it faster but again, there is not any way to make it faster than what you see in the RT version which has been cleaned all that's possible removing most of the drivers and other things that never will be used in the RT. In the PRO version so far they said to have included Windows 8 PRO. The same thing they said about the differences between Office RT and Office Full version to be included also in the PRO. So definitely I do not expect to see a better performance in the PRO version. A Battery Life of 4 to 5 hours is virtually half of a working day. Tell your employer that you are going be working half of your working day. Get it? That means that you will be forced to carry a charger, or an extra batteries or load the Surface PRO with an extended battery if that's possible in the PRO version. Any of this solutions means an extra thing to carry and an extra weight.

So why PRO? Just to be able to run any Windows Application? The amount of applications for RT is growing daily and soon you will find replacement for those Windows programs that you are currently using and missing. For the rest a very simple approach. Keep a PC in your home always running and use it as application server. When you need to run iTunes, for example, you connect via Remote Desktop and run it there. I have been using this method with my iPad for more than a year and now with my Surface RT and it works very well.

So what's the selling point of Surface PRO? At least for me none. So if MS did not convinced me who will be convinced?

Apple has shifted the market showing users other ways that work better for the majority of the users. Sticking to old concepts will not in anyway help Microsoft to compete against Apple.

Microsoft, I'm hanging my boxing gloves

Microsoft, I’m hanging my boxing gloves

Something in this company is extremely wrong and you do not have to be an expert to notice it. The scariest thing is that those with the power to do something do nothing. It’s like they are blind.

A month ago Microsoft released the Surface RT to the world, according to the company the reason to start selling its own Tablet was the lack of quality of the Tablets and other devices that the hardware partners were selling loaded with Windows. If you want something well done you have to do it yourself.

For those that follow the life and changes of this technology world this sounded like an awakening of a huge monster that was sleeping perhaps for a very long time. This was what everybody was waiting to see. The beginning of a real competition between this company and Apple. Without competition there is not a source for innovation. Part of us were tired of seeing iPads released with the same old iOS full of restrictions and without big changes since it was released for the first time. Windows 8 and Surface RT was the change that we were hoping to see. A hardware well made with an Operating System that finally was bringing something new and different since Windows 95 was released, an OS with a new user interface capable of handling touch and mouse. Simple and easy to use.

And what did we get? A Surface RT with a hardware that you could only dream about it with a keyboard of amazing characteristics that under heavy use lasts few weeks, no reaching even a month. The first fiasco. What failed? The lack of experience of the company picked for this project? The poor quality control from a company – Microsoft- with little experience as PC manufacturer?

And if the keyboard fiasco was not enough with have hundreds of users complaining about WiFi disconnecting or connecting with limited functionality, we have little problems with the OS and some of the programs included in the Surface RT and we had to deal with a preview version of Office 2013 that generated a lot of bad press in the blogosphere from people testing it without having upgraded first to the full version.

I cannot imagine a scenario where nobody at MS did not notice the WiFi issue. Yes, I’m not suffering from this issue but I have played around with my AP and Surface RT up to a point where I got it working. SOMETHING THAT THE AVERAGE USER SHOULD NOT BE DOING. What the average user wants is something that finds an AP and connects EVERY SINGLE TIME. Like an iPad. If Microsoft did not find this issue was because they rushed this device to the market without testing it enough. And I’m talking about real life tests. No Labs tests. I do not know how many 1000s of MVPs Microsoft has, why you don’t use them for these tests, you do not trust them and NDA, then use your own employees. DO SOMETHING, THINK OUT OF THE BOX! But do not release a product in this condition if you are thinking about set an example to be followed by your hardware partners.

A Mail software without POP3 support. I do not care if this is an obsolete technology. I do not use it. But there is a lot of users using it. You were open minded to support Flash, another obsolete technology, so why exclude POP3? The Mail program has many other problems, it stops working from time to time, crashes, it does not report correctly the number of new messages in the home screen tile, etc.

I was reading yesterday an article from one of the news sites I follow where the conclusion was that the Surface was not ready for the average user and just for IT professionals and I hate to say it but I agree. I won’t recommend this device to anybody that is an average user. I have been defending this device that to me is a lot better than any Tablet in the market including the iPads. But it’s not for everybody. It’s not ready to compete against the iPad.

But wait, this is not all. This week the prices and official specs for the Surface PRO was unveiled. A battery life of about 4 hours! That’s all you read everywhere!  4 hours of battery life was what the best UMPC were getting. And the whole UMPC concept was dropped and one of the reason was that. It’s time for manufacturers to comprehend that if they do not release a Tablet with at least 8 hours of battery life is better to no release it.

Another point that scares me is that may be somebody at Microsoft is thinking that by releasing the Surface PRO as soon as possible they can generate more sales. You are wrong! With that battery life users are looking at Surface Pro like this one is just an UMPC or TabletPC and those two concepts are not working any more. They love the simplicity and mobility of Tablets. They do not want to carry a Tablet and a charger. You will get more revenue by fixing the Surface RT issues before Christmas and staying with RT than wasting your time and money with the PRO version.

Surface PRO is a TabletPC and the market will act like it has been doing it all these years with TabletPCs and UMPC. None of these two concepts were popular and have not been able to compete against Apple’s iPad.

I believe that Surface RT is a winner product. But for this to become that we need to see changes at Microsoft. The responsible for all these mistakes and bad decisions have to pay for them. I wouldn’t like to see the Surface following the path of the Zune, the UMPC and Windows Mobile.