I'm glad you guys got to see Panos speak
I haven't met him, but he's given similar demos and talks to various teams around campus and is a completely genuine guy. Totall passionate about Surface, to the point where it's become a meme around the office
This is why you're an invaluable asset to these forums. You cut through the bullshit from both ends and (I'm guessing knowing you'd have to answer to fellow members if you're caught slipping,) I've never read you being dishonest with anything you post. Thanks for this. It's generally in line with the sites (the majority of reviews) that don't seem to have an agenda. It sucks that the negative and sloppy reviews seem to get the most play but I'm getting a better image of the device and it's a bright one
I'm glad you think so. I'm obviously biased and I can't help it, especially since Windows 8 isn't just another Microsoft product, but one that I was deeply involved with from the very beginning of planning - where I saw concept videos demonstrating the vision of the product very similar to what shipped before Apple ever announced the iPad. Yet none of us except for the Surface team itself even knew Surface existed until the public announcement. It's been tremendously exciting seeing what everyone thought, mixed with incredible anxiety anticipating that everything might go horribly wrong
At work, we're pretty much the biggest cynical critics out there. If you've seen a complaint in a review, even the "biased" Gizmodo or TechCrunch, then I could probably forward you 10 lengthy email threads of internal conversations for each of those complaints. I tend to be more optimistic, both at work and on forums, but alas
You might've seen me on GAF berating the horrible GFW Live for many years, or Microsoft's stupid treatment of PC gaming.
So the last thing I want to do is make a bad or misleading recommendation for a product, whether I worked on it or not, for close family members or people on message boards I've never met. If I do, it'll reflect badly on me, and undermine all the work of my coworkers and I. It's why I could never in good conscience recommend a Windows Phone 7 or 7.5 to my friends or family (but will wholeheartedly do so for WP8), and why I don't try to pretend I know everyone's needs when talking about Surface.
So if anyone has any questions about Surface, I'd be happy to answer them. I've scoured the last few pages of the thread to try to answer some I've seen:
If it can stream media wirelessly to a 360 or whatever, that'll be really cool.
Can it...?
Can it do it natively like with the iPad and appleTV though? Or does it rely on third party apps?
I feel that if microsoft doesn't look into that kind of integration they are missing out on a huge opportunity.
PlayTo is a huge part of Windows 8, including Surface. You unfortunately can't mirror your display, but individual apps can easily build support. It also requires an Xbox with the update that just rolled out starting last week or other compatible DLNA certified PlayTo device.
When you're in an app that supports it, just use the Devices charm, and select the device to play the content to.
My favorite part? The Video app uses the normal File Picker interface. This means that with a few taps, you could open the Video app, open a file using File Picker with anything whether it's local, in some app, or over the network, and then PlayTo your Xbox. Just like that, that video is suddenly playing on your TV.
I keep getting hung up on these "performance issues". I keep going back and forth on cancelling my pre-ordered because I'm worried the device won't be snappy enough. I fear that it will fall behind new tablets in the coming months and become outdated quickly.
At the same time I feel like this is irrational and I'm falling for a lot of pro-Apple shenanigans. That Microsoft would not allow their flagship device to under perform and quickly become outdated.
Someone set me straight!
There are absolutely performance issues, but they're not crippling. The performance gets slow when doing things like opening apps for the first time after a fresh boot, or some games that are shoddy ports. Some apps like Mail and Kindle need a lot of optimization too.
But since every app saves its state, and 15+ apps can do that simultaneously, after the first initial load, they all resume instantly.
I've used iOS devices forever, and still use my iPod Touch all the time, and this is actually expanded beyond what iOS does. iOS just saves app state to memory, and if the memory is needed for something else, apps are killed from memory. At that point, they need to load completely from scratch.
Windows 8/RT, on the other hand, first saves state to memory, but when memory is needed, it also saves further to disk. At that point, they don't need to reload from scratch. Even if the app state was further saved to disk, it still resumes almost instantly. I've tried this with everything from simple apps, to more complex games.
Another thing about performance - it's almost always a perfectly smooth 60FPS scrolling. This holds true in the Start Screen, most apps, and especially in Internet Explorer. Content might sometimes take a bit to pop in, but the scrolling itself is perfectly smooth.
Not having Outlook is still a huge bummer especially with the email app not sounding that hot. Wonder what was their decision point into that.
Office 2013 RT had a ton of changes go into it already. Outlook is a much more complex application than Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. It kills performance on some beefy PCs, it would probably be awful on ARM.
Once the Mail app is improved, that + Calendar + Contacts should be a fairly decent replacement.
Just saw the verge review video. Wow the interface is pretty fast and the gestures are neat. Some apps are sluggish though. And lol at youtube.
Youtube was very bad in that video. Maybe it was playing in 1080p?
It could have been. I mentioned this in my previous epic post, but YouTube is getting fairly regular updates through Windows Update. It's improved dramatically over the last couple weeks. It used to be really stuttery, but now I can watch a full 720p YouTube video (which is native resolution for Surface), and it's almost perfectly smooth.
Metro IE has a whitelist. Desktop IE of course has everything. Click the wrench in Metro IE to jump to the Desktop version.
Not quite, actually. On Windows RT, both Metro and Desktop abide by the same whitelist. On Windows 8, Metro has the whitelist, Desktop does not.
I understand why it's required, and I also understand that you can probably use your Surface in a way that you'll never see that desktop. But when I get mine I plan on using Excel and Word. That means I'm forced to deal with the desktop environment.
Personally, I'm glad that I'm "forced to deal with the Desktop" when using Office. Since Metro apps don't have any concept of windowing or viewing multiple documents at the same time, which I'm constantly doing, Office would be practically unusable to me.
Until that part of Metro is radically improved (if it ever gets improved in that way), I hope the Desktop is never gone.
