Surface 3 10.8" Tablet announced

[Phogg]

I have an Asus Vivotab Note 8. It's very nice, although not as solid as the Surface line.

At this point in time we are maybe two or three months from the marketing of 13nm Broadwell processor models. Although the argument can be made that there is always something better coming down the pike, in this case I believe that the performance and battery life benefits are such that if you buy now you will kick yourself in three months.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Phogg

I have an Asus Vivotab Note 8. It's very nice, although not as solid as the Surface line.

At this point in time we are maybe two or three months from the marketing of 13nm Broadwell processor models. Although the argument can be made that there is always something better coming down the pike, in this case I believe that the performance and battery life benefits are such that if you buy now you will kick yourself in three months.

Those are going into the Surface Pro 4 most likely.
Probably in august, starting at $800+.

Which might produce some S3Pro bargains.
But since I prefer smaller and lighter (10 > 12), the price needs to overlap with the S3 to get me to move up.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Those are going into the Surface Pro 4 most likely.
Probably in august, starting at $800+.

Which might produce some S3Pro bargains.
But since I prefer smaller and lighter (10 > 12), the price needs to overlap with the S3 to get me to move up.

Smaller and lighter is what 13nm processors will give us.
My smartphone is over three years old and I didn't upgrade last year because I wouldn't have had an upgrade available this year.

The Broadwell chips are going to give us full windows machines in a smartphone.

I want a six and a half or seven inch full windows phablet. Looks like I will have that by about June. With luck I can get one with Wacom.

[Josieb1]

I must admit I'd like a windows tablet for Calibre but i just can't work out which ones are worth the money. All the recommended ones seem far too expensive.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Just curious: were those the launch S2 prices? Or discounted, after RT thudded?

No idea what the prices for the S2 were, to be honest, I never had any interest in them. The SP2 (SP = Surface Pro = full windows, running on an i5 processor) on the other hand started at around €600, I think (I think they were slightly cheaper than the SP3's were) The version I have I bought only last year, after the SP3 was introduced, so it was at a discount.

Originally Posted by Josieb1

I must admit I'd like a windows tablet for Calibre but i just can't work out which ones are worth the money. All the recommended ones seem far too expensive.

Expensive is relative. I still don't think I paid too much for my Asus. Nor the SP2 who was twice as expensive. But I am in a position where I have money left over at the end of the month, instead of vice versa... (no kids and two equal good salaries does that to a person )

[Canuck_in_Japan]

Very interesting for me. I'll possibly be going to grad school next year and I have been considering the MacBook Air, Dell XPS and SP3 for an ultralight notebook. T would mainly be an internet/email/Office machine. I could have always gotten a low end notebook for $500 but it would have been a heavy clunker. The others are all approximately $1000 and above. But now there's another option. Very interesting indeed.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Canuck_in_Japan

T would mainly be an internet/email/Office machine.

That would seem to be the ideal use case for a Chromebook. Lightweight and cheap.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you're just using it to store books, that's absolutely true, but it's worth noting that if you want to convert books, especially large books, it is memory-intensive. I have some books I can't convert on my current laptop (i5, 4GB RAM), which is one reason I'll soon be upgrading to a laptop with 16GB RAM.

That's what I thought. I remembered an old laptop being rather slow.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Canuck_in_Japan

Very interesting for me. I'll possibly be going to grad school next year and I have been considering the MacBook Air, Dell XPS and SP3 for an ultralight notebook. T would mainly be an internet/email/Office machine. I could have always gotten a low end notebook for $500 but it would have been a heavy clunker. The others are all approximately $1000 and above. But now there's another option. Very interesting indeed.

OneNote will be very useful in note-taking in an Academic environment.
Especially with the Surface pen.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

That's what I thought. I remembered an old laptop being rather slow.

I should add that the books I can't convert are very large - some of the Delphi "complete works" editions. 50MB+ in size. Normal books convert absolutely fine.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I should add that the books I can't convert are very large - some of the Delphi "complete works" editions. 50MB+ in size. Normal books convert absolutely fine.

Yes, normal books did convert fine for me, just much slower. Also, one person's slow may be another's speedy if they have the patience I am lacking.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

Yes, normal books did convert fine for me, just much slower. Also, one person's slow may be another's speedy if they have the patience I am lacking.

I converted my entire homebrew prettified Gutenberg collection (14k titles) to mobi and to epub on a 2GB first-gen core laptop. Took a week.
I just set it up and went on with my life.

Just set it up beford going to sleep.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I should add that the books I can't convert are very large - some of the Delphi "complete works" editions. 50MB+ in size. Normal books convert absolutely fine.

I've converted a few ordinary novels, one book at a time, from ePub to MOBI/AZW3, and vice versa, with calibre on my Dell Venue 8 Pro (2g RAM, 32g primary storage, 32g microSD card). Calibre and its library are installed on the microSD card (slower than if on the main memory) and had no problems. The conversions took a reasonably modest amount of time.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Expensive is relative. I still don't think I paid too much for my Asus. Nor the SP2 who was twice as expensive. But I am in a position where I have money left over at the end of the month, instead of vice versa... (no kids and two equal good salaries does that to a person )

Problem is I'll happily pay for an IPad Air 2 as I know what it can do and most of the time it's a perfectly good laptop replacement but the same money on a windows tablet is a risk. I don't know what I can do with it, especially without a keyboard as it is a tablet I want.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Josieb1

Problem is I'll happily pay for an IPad Air 2 as I know what it can do and most of the time it's a perfectly good laptop replacement but the same money on a windows tablet is a risk. I don't know what I can do with it, especially without a keyboard as it is a tablet I want.

That is where the 10-point multitouch and the pen/ink datatype come into play.
You don't need a keyboard for precision manipulation so what a Windows tablet can do is: everything a desktop can do and more.
Check the videos at the MS store.

Now, of course, it all relates to what you want to do.

In my case, I need to do some office suite work--creation and editing--and while there is very capable software on Android (Softmaker Office is almost as powerful as MS Office 2003) the android environment gets in the way. The lack of the precision of a pen makes text selection and manipulation a pain. Capacitance styli just don't compare.

On the other hand, for simple email, surfing and ebook reading Android is just fine. So was Windows CE back in the day. But that had decent pen input and controls.

(Yes. I like pen-capable interfaces. Probably because I was never traumatized by Newton or Grafiti. )