Windows 8 Tablet/Review

The Samsung Series 700 tablet will be coming soon, and when it does, it will have Windows 7 on-board. But Samsung likes to get products into developers' hands, as evidenced by its Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Chromebook giveaways to attendees at Google's I/O developers conference.
The Pros

It has the ability to plug in a hard drive or flash drive into the USB port, and then access data as if it were your PC. Only few Android tablets offer this capability (Toshiba Thrive, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet)

File transfers from USB seemed speedy , and images looked great on the 11.6-inch, 1366 by 768-pixel display.
Image and text rendering. 

Microsoft has had a ton of experience here. And after seeing the same images, Web pages, and text on the the hardware-accelerated 700T with Windows 8 compared to the Apple iPad 2 (iOS) and Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Android 3.1), the text rendering on Windows 8 to be better; It wasn't as bad as on iPad 2 , or Galaxy Tab .
Images looked great, too--sharp and with good color balance. 

In the  Web browser view , the Android browser also did a fine job rendering and presenting the images and text.
Size. 

It certainly felt roomy and appealing for reading and viewing content.
Interface.

The modernized Metro style interface present in the Developers' Preview felt well designed and was intuitive to use. Even the handwriting recognition worked well
Performance. 

Microsoft touts Windows 8's fast boot times, and the 700T's startup time, while not quite as impressive as in the Windows 8 demos, was certainly fast.
The touchscreen responded well to touch-typist typing, swiping between open apps was speedy, and file search for images redraw faster . This Developer Preview PC from Samsung came loaded with Intel's second-generation Core i5 processor, 4GB of memory, and a 64GB solid-state drive--it's clearly beefier than typical Android Honeycomb tablets, which have 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processors, 1GB of memory, and between 8GB and 32GB of flash memory .

The Cons
Design and Interface. 

Samsung usually gets the design details down, but some elements of the 700T's hardware are still rough. It has a USB port cover that's useless, buttons that are inset just by that extra millimeter or two that makes them hard to press, and a microSD card slot that has no real protection.
Size and weight. 

At two pounds, this is the heaviest of the tablets we've seen, albeit one that has a solid-feeling build quality . That 11.6-inch display adds to the heft, and to the sense that this is too heavy to hold in one hand for any length of time.
Noise. 

The fan rarely shut off and the constant whirring noise was an unwanted distraction compared with the blissful silence of the iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Heat.  

Even though the fan engaged often (and loudly), the 700T got super toasty. Sure, it needs to cool that hot Intel Core i5 CPU inside, but the heat, coupled with the fan noise--and the next point, battery life--are tradeoffs that many consumers won't want to make on their tablets. The display emanated heat, and the back was warm to the touch, in spite of the generously sized air vents at back.
Battery life. 

The battery life on this preview unit was abysmal. Windows' desktop interface reported about 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life, and it drained down fairly quickly in use. 

Of course, the past three complaints may be solved outright by the use of ARM chips inside a Windows 8 tablet. But as it stands today in the Samsung 700T preview unit, Windows 8 is a severe disappointment compared with the quiet, 10 hours (roughly) you can get with a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or an Apple iPad 2.

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Microsoft Unveils Windows 8, Targets Apple's iPad

September 13, 2011| FoxNews.com

At the Build developer conference in Anaheim, Calif., Microsoft finally pulled the cover off its next-generation operating system, Windows 8 -- a drastic overhaul of the Windows platform -- as the software company looks to refine its focus towards touch-centric devices to compete with Apple's iPad tablet.

"Things are pretty different from 1995, the last time Windows went through a pretty significant evolution," Sinofsky said. "Everything that was great about Windows 7? We took that and made it even better in Windows 8."

The company faces an uphill battle when it goes to sell its new product, however -- something not expected to occur until fall 2012. FoxNews.com revealed last week that businesses are likely to pass on the update. 

Consumers are almost certain to enjoy Windows 8, however: Most PC manufacturers will probably adopt the software for future computers, meaning that new laptop you buy in 2012 might be running it. And the company thinks its new OS will power the tablets of the future.

So what will your next PC look like?

"We're going to re-imagine Windows," Sinofsky said, from the fundamental basics including how the system uses memory and interacts with the processor "all the way up to a brand new user interface."

That interface is called "Metro." It will run on top of the operating system and is clearly intended to work not just with all those computers but also with the emerging world of tablets that have taken consumers by storm. The new UI will displays applications as tiles for quick and easy access while allowing toggling between a classic Windows look.

This represents a complete overhaul of of the Windows interface -- something you certainly don't see every day.

User interface changes include a new "lock screen" for the operating system that gives far more information at a glance than the current iteration of Windows. The operating system also includes pervasive touch input controls -- a signal that Microsoft will be focused on devices that emphasize touch -- namely tablets.

"The minute you use a touch device with Windows 8, I promise you'll go back to your computer and you'll be hitting the screen," Sinofsky said. The company has built a pop-up keyboard into the operating system, and touted spell-check throughout the entire OS as well.

Modern tablets -- notably the industry leading Apple iPad -- feature instant on features and consume very little memory. To demonstrate that Microsoft can compete, Sinofsky demonstrated a Lenovo laptop with an Intel Atom processor and 1Gb of memory running Windows 8. Windows 7 used 404MB of that memory, he said. Windows 8 uses 281 MB of memory, leaving far more free for applications.

That extra memory is "free for you to use with your applications and your software. That's quite an accomplishment," he said. He also showed off computers that boot up in mere seconds. 

The main challenge the company faces in the tablet world: those gizmos rarely run on the standard Intel or AMD chips that power the vast majority of ordinary desktop computers. To enable WIndows 8 to run on the ARM chips that power most of them required the company to rewrite the operating system to support them. The company did. 

Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 8 working seamlessly on an ARM-based tablet device -- proof that the company has made progress on that front. 

His presentation was at a developer conference, of course, so Sinofsky's speech included plenty of information about how applications themselves are written. 

"We had this bold notion that apps should work together as a web of apps so when you add an app, the system gets richer and richer," he said. Microsoft is launching its own app store which will include both Metro-style apps as well as classic Windows 32 programs.

It's far too soon for Microsoft to put a price tag or a release date on the new OS. Heck, it's too early to say when we'll even get a beta version enthusiasts can play with -- although developers at the event were given a pre-release version to begin testing applications with.

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