Windows 8, Surface & Surface Pro Breakdown & Resources

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supernovae

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Microsoft Windows 8, Surface & Surface Pro

User Perspective

Windows 8 = OS. Windows 8 has a new Application ecosystem based around the "App" concept that is called "WinRT" from a programmers perspective by "Metro UI" from an end user / concept perspective. These apps are available from the Windows Store, can be free/purchased (and you can install the purchased apps on up to 5 pcs I believe by using a common store login)

Windows 8 X86 (Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise) runs all legacy applications as well as all new Windows 8 apps. The Microsoft Surface and Surface Pro are hardware solutions running Windows 8. The Surface (non pro) is an ARM tablet that does NOT run legacy applications (X86) but does run Metro Apps and the Surface Pro is an X86 (i5 intel) that does run legacy and current apps (x86) - More described below.

One of the coolest features of Windows 8 is its windows.. love it or hate it, that means even on your tablet you can have your own login/profile and you have all the features thereof and Windows 8 makes roaming profiles synced to live accounts super easy so you get access to all your configs/settings/apps and data (if you sync to skydrive so on and so forth) on every device. I have one surface, my kids have their own login, as does my wife and myself and yet its still setup the way *I* want to use it ;)

Hardware:

All Windows 8 Tablets / Variants have the basic Windows services - Network Sharing/Access, File Manager, HomeGroup Sharing, Devices/USB/HDMI/Printing, Familiar desktop and management services.

Surface Pro - X86 (All legacy & New Metro Apps) - Intel i5 based Tablet. Available in 64gb and 128gb models. (SSD)
Surface - ARM (Office 2013 Basic & Metro Apps) - Nvidia Tegra 3 Based ARM Tablet - COMES with Office 2013 Home & Student too.

Common Surface HW features - MicroHDMI out (dual display/shared display/secondary display support), USB 2.0 (may be USB 3 on pro, need to verify), Micro SD slot - up to 64gb I believe - may support higher density soon. - Very easy to read in almost any viewing angle/light screen compared to many displays. Not the highest resolution if that is all you care for, but when it comes to usability the Surface is great while the Surface Pro at higher resolution really shines. My surface lasts 9-11 hours on a charge, I haven't tried Pro yet but being that its a desktop in a tablet form factor I expect 4-5 hours on Pro

Side by Side Comparison/Feature List:
http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/which-surface-is-right-for-you

To answer the question, yes, the Surface can use my External monitor, run touch apps on the surface screen and Office on the external screen and I can use my Blutooth or USB peripherals, its recognized my flight stick, xbox controller, keyboard, mouse and printer both over USB and Wifi Print.

The Surface and Surface Pro are 16:9 devices, thus the form factor is WIDE but they do support landscape / Portrait modes. A yolk mount surface my be odd / large but does mimic the design of a lot of built in PFD's and bolt ones, so it may be doable. A different perspective than the 4:3 of say the iOS devices, but not negative in its own light. I do expect we will see 4:3 formfactors and smaller/larger sizes that the 10 and 11" of the Surface and Surface Pro Respectively.

There are lots of cool 3rd party tablets available now or coming soon. Lenovo makes some beastly machines and DELL has some new hardware as well. MS isn't the only tablet solution available and there are lots of sizes to choose from.

Applications:

Right now, not much in aviation / flying specific - Windows 8 has Flightaware and a few other flight tracking stuff and a bunch of the typical apps - angry birds, kindle, nook et all. The app store is available in Windows 8 and will only show applications that are available for your specific platform (x86 or arm) so if you see it, you can use it. Don't forget if you share the app store ID (and password protect it) a purchased App can be on up to 5 devices. This means your tablet, your wifes tablet, your desktop and your laptop can all install the app as long as you share the store ID.

Developer Perspective

Developer toolkit/api download.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516

Application Store:

WinRT Api for "Metro" or "Modern UI" Apps
C#, C++, JavaScript/HTML5
Visual Tusdio Express is freely available to start developing today.

Non Application Store - X86 only at this point unless you are MS.
Whatever tools you have developed with, they should still work ;)

Windows Phone 8:

Windows Phone 8 is the consolidation of the Windows Phone platform to the Windows 8 Kernel and some of the WinRT API model. Windows Phone 8 is still mostly based on Silverlght from a developer perspective but it it terribly easy to share projects / code between Phone & Tablet / Desktop and MS has been improving this functionality and I expect it to consolidate even further. Unlike Google & Apple, Microsoft chose to focus on integrating the Desktop/Tablet experience rather than bring the Phone experience to a Tablet, the market will decide how that is accepted but that is the "initial paradigm". The phone i'm sure will be brought closer and closer together where at one point there may be no difference, but we shall see. Windows Phone 8 right now is ARM based, however it appears Intel is aggressively working with MS to have an INTEL based Phone available. The Phone also runs the "Metro UI" experience so once you learn one, the other is just as intuitive - so there is a lot shared. I highly recommend the Nokia 920 and again, hope to see Aviation apps ported to this platform as the 920 is very capable phone.

PS, no.. I do not work for Microsoft ;) Just wanted to share my experiences. I'm an Oracle DBA by day running most of my stuff on Linux but I for one am happy to see a competitive tablet/mobile space even if that means telling the world about some rather awesome stuff Microsoft has achieved.

No nonsense review from someone who isn't coming in already hating everything MS lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTOiVvHCIyI&feature=share&list=LL6dUnpAonbN_S8BWeZ0QYIA
 
Hopefully this gives some of you an idea what to expect coming down from MS regarding tablets / portable computing.

Right now, I do know Jeppesen is working with MS to make their applications available on Windows 8 - Surface / Surface Pro /Desktop /Laptop et all, but no idea when that will be available.

Until then, IE10 is pretty powerful and AOPA flight planning works pretty well with touch browser and the Surface keyboard touch cover or type cover mean you can do just about any website flight planning as if you were on a laptop anyway to get around lack of developer support for web touch controls or non native apps.
 
Super,
I am looking at a Surface Pro, and spent a while deciding whether to get a Surface RT or Pro.
A couple of things, because they may not have been clear:

- Windows RT - Used on the Surface (not Surface Pro) - It is NOT Windows 8. Think of it as Microsoft's version of iOS (only apps from the App Store). Runs on lower power processors, cannot run Windows programs you have now. Just like you can't install Mac programs on an iPad, you can't install Windows programs on RT (yes, they should have named it something else).

- Windows 8 - Used on the Surface Pro, can run Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8 programs you currently own.

- Surface RT - Runs on Windows RT. Relatively inexpensive. Comes with an RT version of Office, remember you can only use apps from the app store. Capacitive touchscreen, lower resolution that Surface Pro. USB 2.0, HD video out.

- Surface pro - Runs Windows 8. More expensive (but no more than a high end iPad). Full Windows, runs anything. Higher resolution screen. USB 3.0.
Active digitizer with pen for handwriting capture, etc (that's why I'm getting one, for OneNote and Evernote notetaking).

The killer for me was that Windows RT/Surface RT will not sync with Skydrive, meaning it does not cache your Skydrive folders locally so that you can't use them absent an internet connection.
Windows 8 (Surface Pro) will cache and sync your Skydrive files.
So between the active digitizer and the file sync, Pro is the way to go for me.

Thanks, hope that helps.
 
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I have a Surface Pro and Surface now. Surface Pro is just on borrow for the time being, but to answer the statement above, they both do run windows 8, the only "windows" difference is that the Surface can't be logged into a domain account (for whatever reason) but it still has Windows under the hood, its like IOS in the sense it can only run "Windows Store" apps like an IOS device can only run Apple Store apps, but its more like windows in the fact that it runs a full multi tasking os, has homegroup/shared folders/network acces.. you can open up a CMD prompt, run powershell scripts, use the desktop and run Office 2013. The big thing is that "Surface" is ARM and "Surface Pro" is X86 - the different CPU's physically limit what one platform can do over another and MS simply has a policy that ONLY Microsoft can publish typical "desktop" applications for "ARM" while "X86" remains open like its always been for any legacy or new apps to run.

Confusing.. a bit.. I guess.. I'm used to it :) When Windows NT first came out they had Windows NT for MIPS, Intel and DEC Alpha.. you had to compile your programs for any of the 3 architectures so superficially they were all different windows for different architectures but this time around MS simply fixed the architecture differences by making the API arch agnostic for the most part and posting binary assemblies in the store for each supported ARCH as long as the OS is "windows 8" based and has "Windows store" functionality with WinRT.
 
I'm getting Pro when they are available because I need the integration. I'm expecting to reduce my computers from 4 to 2.
I hope aviation apps are developed soon but am not holding my breath. At Sebring, WingX told me they had no plans to put it on Windows 8. I hope I got that wrong and they do choose to do so.
I have Windows 8 on my desktop and am having some trouble getting the new concepts in my head. My daughter brought her Surface around and that seemed pretty easy to grok.
 
jnmeade said:
I'm getting Pro when they are available because I need the integration. I'm expecting to reduce my computers from 4 to 2.
I hope aviation apps are developed soon but am not holding my breath. At Sebring, WingX told me they had no plans to put it on Windows 8. I hope I got that wrong and they do choose to do so.
I have Windows 8 on my desktop and am having some trouble getting the new concepts in my head. My daughter brought her Surface around and that seemed pretty easy to grok.
Click to expand...

Pro is pretty much in stock now at most retailers. The only vendor I got confirmed product development from was Jeppesen, but realistically, the others will most likely have to jump on board before long.. 600+ million windows 8 users will be hard to ignore.

MS also briefly mentioned smaller form factors being a possibility, I thik a 7-8" device would help some developers be more welcoming to the platform.

I've sent off emails/questions to a few of the USB ADS/GPS receivers to see what they're up to windows 8 support wise
 
I'm using a Win8 desktop at home, but I use the Win7-like UI for most operations. If I had a touchscreen I might be more comfortable regularly using the Win8 UI. IE10 seems to have a huge memory leak issue so I use Chrome most of the time.

I used Visual Studio Express a few months ago on a Win8 pre-release machine and coded up a simple app. It took some trial and error to figure things out, but once you've coded one app then it should be easier to code additional apps.
 
So, here's my gripes with the Surface RT.

The "Metro apps" that run from the start menu are not fully baked. For example, if I go into IE from Metro, then try to open a file on my Sharepoint site, it's won't open in Office RT (it says there's no app to open the file).
But if I go into IE from the desktop and go into Sharepoint, then it will open the file in Office RT.

Again, Skydrive will not sync your files to the machine. But unlike an IPad, Windows RT has a file system and will allow you to save files to your machine (or to the 64gb SD card I put in it), then you can access it from any program on the machine.

On the plus side:

I love the battery life and weight, and l love the typecover.

You can also install a network printer and print to it, just like any other PC. And unlike an IPad.

Also, the Office suite of apps work like you would expect. They are seamless.
I have always been disappointed with IPad office suites, and the inability to have them behave properly. Especially when working on a collaborative document and trying to track and see revisions and such, or when working with Powerpoint presentations.
Also, on an IPad, you can't open files or save files directly to a Sharepoint or online storage site.

And while a trackpad on the touch cover might seem irrelevant for a tablet, in some websites the ability to hover over something (like popdown menus) cannot be overestimated. On an IPad, there are some sites I can't use because the web designer requires a hover to open a menu, and tapping on it (a la IPad) does nothing.

So, for an entertainment machine, the IPad is much better. But for productivity, the Surface RT works much better.

Surface Pro is no comparison. It is a full PC, with all the benefits and problems that suggests. I have decided I really don't need an active stylus, so that benefit doesn't matter.
The hotsync and offline access to Skydrive might be a requirement that drives me to Pro.
 
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OK , new PIREP:

VERY COOL! I used a Powerpoint on the Surface RT, connected to the projector. Worked flawlessly, PLUS on the Surface's screen (not the projector), it showed the current slide, the next slide (so you know what's coming), plus any slide notes.
It also showed a timer from when you started the presentation, a toggle to black the screen, a button to bring up a slide sorter view (so you can jump to another part of the presentation).
Plus, a "laser pointer" where you can point on the Surface screen and a red dot moves around on the projected screen

A wireless presentation remote works through the USB port, flawlessly.

I am typing this with the Surface RT going through a KVM to a 21inch monitor, using the Dell keyboard and mouse connected to the KVM.
It is dual monitor mode, and works flawlessly.

I started off a little iffy, but the Powerpoint features, the mouse/keyboard/video features, and the ease of use make this a no brainer.
 
I'm really enjoying my Surface RT as well, I hope Jeppesen can get their EFB apps out here asap as i'm excited to see how well those work.
 
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