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Author here. Before spending so much time with the Surface I'd have been really enthusiastic about the idea of a Microsoft Phone following the Nokia purchase. N

Author here. Before spending so much time with the Surface I'd have been really enthusiastic about the idea of a Microsoft Phone following the Nokia purchase. Now, I just can't see them getting all the little details right. It's a real shame, there's so much potential here. I know people with Windows Phones love them; do they also do things like screw up the screen rotation, force a reboot with 15 minutes warning and update every few days? I'm guessing not; if only the Surface division had made the same choices. I feel as if a tablet really needs to be a magic slate first, a general purpose PC second (if at all).

stinos 13y ago
Haven't used the RT, but can't you just turn off automatic updating? Btw I also seem to remember in Word you can make it save 'auto-backups' or whatever they call it every x minutes, maybe that will give you some more piece of mind when using it? Have used WP8 though, and that was quite an amazing experience (probably partly becuase I expected it to be crap, but definitely also because it's just pretty good).
- jpatte 13y ago
  On Windows 8 (not sure about RT) you can indeed turn off automatic restarts, as described in the first answer here : http://superuser.com/questions/490993/is-there-anyway-to-stop-windows-8-from-restarting-for-an-update http://superuser.com/questions/490993/is-there-anyway-to-sto... Though it's a shame this option is absolutely non user-friendly in my opinion.
kevingadd 13y ago
There's some weird stuff in your linked article that makes me wonder if Surface RT is some parallel nightmare universe version of normal Windows 8 beyond the typical 'ARM only' bit. Don't consider this nitpicking; just some questions that came to mind, since your experience is so different from mine using win8 on a tablet. Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95! Did the machine really power itself off, losing your work, every week even if you had it in hibernate or sleep mode? That would really surprise me, I haven't seen my tablet do that. Windows Update is a troublemaker, for sure, though... Why is the keyboard behavior you describe such a problem? For me, I consider the Windows 8 behavior the only optimal choice: Windows software in general is designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly every time you tap. The android/iOS behavior of keyboards popping up at random as the focus moves around can be a real pain when trying to precision target objects, scroll around, or highlight content. There are certainly cases where it's unambiguous and the keyboard could just be popped up, but at most I found that a minor nitpick when interacting with W8 on a daily basis - and you've got a Surface, where you can just attach a keyboard and start typing. Is it just something that really annoyed you, from a friction perspective, even though it doesn't have a big workflow impact?
- mbreese 13y ago
  > Windows software in general is designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly every time you tap. Maybe that's an indication that stock Windows as a tablet OS is a mismatch. When you have to compromise the user experience to support legacy software (or any non-tablet software), then maybe that's a bad sign. Or at least a sign for where Microsoft's priorities lie. When you're competing against slick iPads and Android tablets, that you don't want to compromise the user experience for backwards compatibility. Now, if you aren't competing against iOS/Android [1], then maybe you can make that choice. But, as least for the author, that was the comparison. [1] Which I'd argue they shouldn't be...
- twinwing 13y ago
  > Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95! The last Microsoft Word version with Autosave is 97[1], from 2000 onwards it was changed to Autorecover (from crash)[2]. [1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535 [2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686
bhauer 13y ago
I think you and I are of like minds with respect to what a tablet should be. Not quite identical, but similar. I personally would like a tablet to be a view on personal applications whose state exists on a network-connect compute environment that runs for my use--to host my applications. I call this "personal application omnipresence" and would prefer it across all my devices. It can be approximated with various trickery, but no systems exist that were purpose-built to perform this way out of the box. I want a singular instance of my Twitter application, a singular e-mail application, a singular IRC client, a singular Office suite, etc. And I don't want to ever synchronize state because with a singular application, there is no synchronization. With that in mind, I strongly agree with your sentiment that the Surface isn't the zen-like device I want. I don't actually want another first-class computing device. I don't want it to persist state when I close it because I don't want a tablet to have state at all. I also don't want my phone to have state, nor my desktop PC. I want a singular state for all of my applications hosted on a compute server I operate. I'm not sure what you mean by a "magic slate," but when I use words like those, I mean a view on applications that run elsewhere. Something analogous to the tablets seen in the film Avatar, where views are just present on a pane of glass (of course, a transparent display makes for fun sci-fi scenery, but isn't very practical). I think Microsoft is the best situated of the titans to attack a computing model like PAO, but so far I don't see them moving in that direction. Instead, they seem presently fixated on the plain cloud model that has--to-date at least--been successful for their competitors. Perhaps in time. My own rants on Microsoft: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
- mr_luc 13y ago
  I bookmarked your original ipad/linode article for later reading since I hadn't seen them. That notion of singular applications that you yourself control comes up a lot on HN, and it does seem like a great future. A whole ecosystem of supporting services (and maybe standards) would probably need to emerge were this to be the norm for how people compute, but it seems like it could be for the best, pushing the cloud all the way down to the user.
- robomartin 13y ago
  > I don't actually want another first-class computing device. I don't want it to persist state when I close it because I don't want a tablet to have state at all. I also don't want my phone to have state, nor my desktop PC. I want a singular state for all of my applications hosted on a compute server I operate. I strongly disagree with this view unless you are talking about this server you operate being within your own office network. For anything outside the office/home having to rely on network access, if we are talking about business, simply isn't smart. Traveling teaches this very quickly. You can't assume the network will be reachable when you need it. I've traveled extensively within the US, Europe and South America. Things are always getting better. However, if you are there on business and the files and data you need to access are critical to your mission you'd be well advised to not rely on being able to access the network. I do agree that the idea of having, at the very least, a secure, centralized and reliably accessible data store would be fantastic. At the same time, there are huge holes in the viability of such an approach for a number of use cases. For example, applications such as SolidWorks, the Xilinx FPGA development suite or a number of 3D rendering/animation packages are not going to do very well if both the sometimes massive amount of data they require is remotely hosted. Running some of these applications over a remote desktop type environment (both app and data hosted remotely) just doesn't work very well at all. If the opinion is that a tablet is simply a window into a server and nothing else things are very different. I am not sure that is the best use for the form factor. As an example, I am tending to purchase technical books in electronic form now rather than paper. As such, my iPad has now become my roving bookshelf. I don't have to worry about having network access in order to read any of my books. They are always there. I've had a love/hate relationship with tablets. They are great for browsing the web, reading a book (although it is a far better experience on a multi-monitor desktop with large screens) and, yes, playing games. I have failed to identify any real work I can do on a tablet. A short email here and there, yes, anything more complex than that is a pain in the ass. Even sending a bunch of attachments with an email on an iPad is an absolute pain. Until the advent of Windows 8 (notice I did not say "Surface") I saw tablets as entertainment systems. Sure, there are verticals where they can and are being used in business. Cash registers, for example. For me Windows 8 changed everything. Not that W8 is thrilling. I think they screwed up quite a few things. I was really critical of it at first. However, when you look at it in the context of a hybrid tablet/laptop machine you've arrived at almost the ideal business machine (or multi-use) paradigm in many ways. Nothing is more frustrating to me than trying to type on something like an iPad. It's crap. Even something as simple as cursor control for selection and editing is horrible. Not much work has gone into improving this. If you look at a W8 hybrid you, all of a sudden, have the possibility of operating it as a tablet for a bunch of use cases --from reading books and browsing the web to making presentations-- as well as switching to "real computer" mode to run Excel, Solidworks or anything else you care to. You can run desktop class software while having a tablet available if needed. I won't go as far as saying that is genius, but it is really neat. The other thing W8 does is that it, to some extent, democratizes and liberates the tablet. Apple's choke-hold on the things you can and cannot do with their platform continues to baffle me. I fully understand it in the context of making a device that both grandma and an eight year old can use. No issues with that. If that's their market, that's their market. In exchange for that we can't even plug a USB drive into the thing and grab, move and access files as we see fit. A W8 tablet is simply running Windows, with all the access and flexibility that entails. Having everything live on the cloud sounds great until a quarter of the country --every business, school, government office and home-- goes down because a cloud service provider had a major problem or one of the myriad of potential network problems causes a major outage.
WayneDB 13y ago
Any reason you didn't go with the Surface Pro? It's basically the same size as an RT but it comes with a full operating system and hypervisor... I love my 128GB model and I'll probably get the second version when they come out with it. Also, here are instructions to change the Word auto-save frequency - http://en.kioskea.net/faq/8283-word-change-auto-save-frequency http://en.kioskea.net/faq/8283-word-change-auto-save-frequen...
- amenod 13y ago
  I think you missed the point - there should be no frequency. Data should just "be".
  - sejje 13y ago
    I think you don't understand the implementation. There's always a frequency.
  - WayneDB 13y ago
    So, you want every character that you type to be immediately flushed to your SSD then? What device does that?
Metrop0218 13y ago
I would wait till version two comes out before writing anything off. Surface 2 will undoubtedly address many of the flaws that you (and me) found. Since Microsoft will be iterating on Nokia's Lumia's, I wouldn't write that off either.
abhinavk 13y ago
GDR3 brings Screen Rotation lock and Windows Phone is a different beast than RT. They get quarterly updates.
Pxtl 13y ago
Yeah, my winphone doesn't do any of that stuff. That said, I also don't have the kind of access to the filesystem win8rt gives you. The biggest wart on my WP7 phone is the way the Notes were relegated into the ghetto of MS office apps, meaning all the overhead of MS office got in the way... Notes are meant to be convenient.

stinos 13y ago

Haven't used the RT, but can't you just turn off automatic updating? Btw I also seem to remember in Word you can make it save 'auto-backups' or whatever they call it every x minutes, maybe that will give you some more piece of mind when using it? Have used WP8 though, and that was quite an amazing experience (probably partly becuase I expected it to be crap, but definitely also because it's just pretty good).

jpatte 13y ago
On Windows 8 (not sure about RT) you can indeed turn off automatic restarts, as described in the first answer here : http://superuser.com/questions/490993/is-there-anyway-to-stop-windows-8-from-restarting-for-an-update http://superuser.com/questions/490993/is-there-anyway-to-sto... Though it's a shame this option is absolutely non user-friendly in my opinion.

kevingadd 13y ago

There's some weird stuff in your linked article that makes me wonder if Surface RT is some parallel nightmare universe version of normal Windows 8 beyond the typical 'ARM only' bit. Don't consider this nitpicking; just some questions that came to mind, since your experience is so different from mine using win8 on a tablet. Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95! Did the machine really power itself off, losing your work, every week even if you had it in hibernate or sleep mode? That would really surprise me, I haven't seen my tablet do that. Windows Update is a troublemaker, for sure, though... Why is the keyboard behavior you describe such a problem? For me, I consider the Windows 8 behavior the only optimal choice: Windows software in general is designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly every time you tap. The android/iOS behavior of keyboards popping up at random as the focus moves around can be a real pain when trying to precision target objects, scroll around, or highlight content. There are certainly cases where it's unambiguous and the keyboard could just be popped up, but at most I found that a minor nitpick when interacting with W8 on a daily basis - and you've got a Surface, where you can just attach a keyboard and start typing. Is it just something that really annoyed you, from a friction perspective, even though it doesn't have a big workflow impact?

mbreese 13y ago
> Windows software in general is designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly every time you tap. Maybe that's an indication that stock Windows as a tablet OS is a mismatch. When you have to compromise the user experience to support legacy software (or any non-tablet software), then maybe that's a bad sign. Or at least a sign for where Microsoft's priorities lie. When you're competing against slick iPads and Android tablets, that you don't want to compromise the user experience for backwards compatibility. Now, if you aren't competing against iOS/Android [1], then maybe you can make that choice. But, as least for the author, that was the comparison. [1] Which I'd argue they shouldn't be...
twinwing 13y ago
> Word doesn't have autosave anymore? It's had it since like Office 95! The last Microsoft Word version with Autosave is 97[1], from 2000 onwards it was changed to Autorecover (from crash)[2]. [1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77535 [2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/107686

bhauer 13y ago

I think you and I are of like minds with respect to what a tablet should be. Not quite identical, but similar. I personally would like a tablet to be a view on personal applications whose state exists on a network-connect compute environment that runs for my use--to host my applications. I call this "personal application omnipresence" and would prefer it across all my devices. It can be approximated with various trickery, but no systems exist that were purpose-built to perform this way out of the box. I want a singular instance of my Twitter application, a singular e-mail application, a singular IRC client, a singular Office suite, etc. And I don't want to ever synchronize state because with a singular application, there is no synchronization. With that in mind, I strongly agree with your sentiment that the Surface isn't the zen-like device I want. I don't actually want another first-class computing device. I don't want it to persist state when I close it because I don't want a tablet to have state at all. I also don't want my phone to have state, nor my desktop PC. I want a singular state for all of my applications hosted on a compute server I operate. I'm not sure what you mean by a "magic slate," but when I use words like those, I mean a view on applications that run elsewhere. Something analogous to the tablets seen in the film Avatar, where views are just present on a pane of glass (of course, a transparent display makes for fun sci-fi scenery, but isn't very practical). I think Microsoft is the best situated of the titans to attack a computing model like PAO, but so far I don't see them moving in that direction. Instead, they seem presently fixated on the plain cloud model that has--to-date at least--been successful for their competitors. Perhaps in time. My own rants on Microsoft: http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft

mr_luc 13y ago
I bookmarked your original ipad/linode article for later reading since I hadn't seen them. That notion of singular applications that you yourself control comes up a lot on HN, and it does seem like a great future. A whole ecosystem of supporting services (and maybe standards) would probably need to emerge were this to be the norm for how people compute, but it seems like it could be for the best, pushing the cloud all the way down to the user.
robomartin 13y ago
> I don't actually want another first-class computing device. I don't want it to persist state when I close it because I don't want a tablet to have state at all. I also don't want my phone to have state, nor my desktop PC. I want a singular state for all of my applications hosted on a compute server I operate. I strongly disagree with this view unless you are talking about this server you operate being within your own office network. For anything outside the office/home having to rely on network access, if we are talking about business, simply isn't smart. Traveling teaches this very quickly. You can't assume the network will be reachable when you need it. I've traveled extensively within the US, Europe and South America. Things are always getting better. However, if you are there on business and the files and data you need to access are critical to your mission you'd be well advised to not rely on being able to access the network. I do agree that the idea of having, at the very least, a secure, centralized and reliably accessible data store would be fantastic. At the same time, there are huge holes in the viability of such an approach for a number of use cases. For example, applications such as SolidWorks, the Xilinx FPGA development suite or a number of 3D rendering/animation packages are not going to do very well if both the sometimes massive amount of data they require is remotely hosted. Running some of these applications over a remote desktop type environment (both app and data hosted remotely) just doesn't work very well at all. If the opinion is that a tablet is simply a window into a server and nothing else things are very different. I am not sure that is the best use for the form factor. As an example, I am tending to purchase technical books in electronic form now rather than paper. As such, my iPad has now become my roving bookshelf. I don't have to worry about having network access in order to read any of my books. They are always there. I've had a love/hate relationship with tablets. They are great for browsing the web, reading a book (although it is a far better experience on a multi-monitor desktop with large screens) and, yes, playing games. I have failed to identify any real work I can do on a tablet. A short email here and there, yes, anything more complex than that is a pain in the ass. Even sending a bunch of attachments with an email on an iPad is an absolute pain. Until the advent of Windows 8 (notice I did not say "Surface") I saw tablets as entertainment systems. Sure, there are verticals where they can and are being used in business. Cash registers, for example. For me Windows 8 changed everything. Not that W8 is thrilling. I think they screwed up quite a few things. I was really critical of it at first. However, when you look at it in the context of a hybrid tablet/laptop machine you've arrived at almost the ideal business machine (or multi-use) paradigm in many ways. Nothing is more frustrating to me than trying to type on something like an iPad. It's crap. Even something as simple as cursor control for selection and editing is horrible. Not much work has gone into improving this. If you look at a W8 hybrid you, all of a sudden, have the possibility of operating it as a tablet for a bunch of use cases --from reading books and browsing the web to making presentations-- as well as switching to "real computer" mode to run Excel, Solidworks or anything else you care to. You can run desktop class software while having a tablet available if needed. I won't go as far as saying that is genius, but it is really neat. The other thing W8 does is that it, to some extent, democratizes and liberates the tablet. Apple's choke-hold on the things you can and cannot do with their platform continues to baffle me. I fully understand it in the context of making a device that both grandma and an eight year old can use. No issues with that. If that's their market, that's their market. In exchange for that we can't even plug a USB drive into the thing and grab, move and access files as we see fit. A W8 tablet is simply running Windows, with all the access and flexibility that entails. Having everything live on the cloud sounds great until a quarter of the country --every business, school, government office and home-- goes down because a cloud service provider had a major problem or one of the myriad of potential network problems causes a major outage.

WayneDB 13y ago

Any reason you didn't go with the Surface Pro? It's basically the same size as an RT but it comes with a full operating system and hypervisor... I love my 128GB model and I'll probably get the second version when they come out with it. Also, here are instructions to change the Word auto-save frequency - http://en.kioskea.net/faq/8283-word-change-auto-save-frequency http://en.kioskea.net/faq/8283-word-change-auto-save-frequen...

amenod 13y ago
I think you missed the point - there should be no frequency. Data should just "be".
- sejje 13y ago
  I think you don't understand the implementation. There's always a frequency.
- WayneDB 13y ago
  So, you want every character that you type to be immediately flushed to your SSD then? What device does that?

Metrop0218 13y ago

I would wait till version two comes out before writing anything off. Surface 2 will undoubtedly address many of the flaws that you (and me) found. Since Microsoft will be iterating on Nokia's Lumia's, I wouldn't write that off either.

abhinavk 13y ago

GDR3 brings Screen Rotation lock and Windows Phone is a different beast than RT. They get quarterly updates.

Pxtl 13y ago

Yeah, my winphone doesn't do any of that stuff. That said, I also don't have the kind of access to the filesystem win8rt gives you. The biggest wart on my WP7 phone is the way the Notes were relegated into the ghetto of MS office apps, meaning all the overhead of MS office got in the way... Notes are meant to be convenient.