Displaying items by tag: Tablet

At CES 2010 we watched as the “PC” world began to gear up for its onslaught into the tablet market. Many at the time were still claiming that Apple was going to hold the market simply because they had a very big foot hold (and still do). However as we watched press briefings from Asus, Lenovo, nVidia, AMD, and Intel we saw something very interesting; the move to tablets that make sense for everyone. We are not talking about the choice of OS here either.

For those of you that are pinning for the Asus Padfone (we know we are) there is some good news (well sort of). Since it was first shown off at CES 2010 (in render form) there has been talk about battery life. Now that we have seen what devices like the Transformer and Transformer prime can do there has been even more speculation on the topic. Well is seems that Asus decided to let Engadget in on some battery performance numbers.

When Microsoft first announced that only Microsoft based products would have access to the “desktop” mode in Windows on ARM (Windows RT) we began to wonder just how long it would take for Mozilla, Google, Opera and others to chime in about how wrong this is. We now have heard from Mozilla who seems to feel that this lock out from the desktop is nothing more than Microsoft being unfair to the competition and, according to Mozilla, is in violate of the promises Microsoft made to both the EU and the US DoJ.

As you might have noticed we have been following Windows 8 and all of the expected and unexpected features and pitfalls that it might bring to the market. So far we have found that the core of the OS appears to be pretty solid and while there is plenty of room for improvement, even the consumer preview version of the OS could be used as-is. Now this is great, but it is important to remember that Windows 8 is a split personality OS. Microsoft is trying to bridge two very different markets with a single product; Windows 8 for the x86/64 PC and Windows 8 on ARM (called Windows RT).

There will be some rejoicing as AMD managed to grab a tiny amount of the x86 market share from Intel last quarter. According to Mercury research AMD’s combined x86 market share rose from 18.2 percent to 19.1. This .9 percent rise was attributed to AMD’s strong offering in the mobile market although some reports seemed to suggest otherwise.

We have had quite a bit on Microsoft’s next operating system here on the site including gaming performance, Internet Explorer 10 and the Metro UI (which we still do not particularly like). After tinkering around with Windows 8 and seeing the potential underneath we do get that even if Windows 8 is not a blockbuster it will change the way that the tablet market works forever.

As I made my rounds this morning (checking out what the rest of the world thinks is going on in technology) I stumbled across a couple of articles that had my laughing. One of them was just more of what I have been hearing since 1997, the PC is going away. I honestly do not know how some analyst firms can even print this any longer. The PC has been a fixture in the home and work place for so long and it is such an integrated fixture in how people do work that it is very unlikely you will see the PC go away. Still we see this almost every quarter despite both many “PC” related companies posting record quarters and PC sales actually being up between 2-4%.

Microsoft is doing the hard sell on Windows 8 features and in particular they have made a valiant effort to push past some of the bad press (and consumer grumbling) about Metro UI and the way many of the apps are locked down. We have talked a little about this and even touched on it during some of our gaming coverage. Although you can launch “desktop” applications from the Start Screen (The Metro UI interface) you are not actually running them there. The only apps that will run in Metro UI Mode are ones that are downloaded from the Microsoft Store. This limits the functionality of the OS in many ways. Sure you can get some applications to interact with each other, but even then there are limitations.

Momentum is an amazing thing. When an object or company has it, it can seem like nothing can slow it down and indeed is can be hard to stop something that has built up momentum. For example, Apple has had a massive movement behind their company and products their momentum had built up over years of careful marketing and catchy products. To many analysts it seemed like nothing could stop Apple. However; when you are driving along passing cars with ease and you suddenly shift from fifth into third you will quickly find out how much of a bad day you are going to have and how easy it is to lose that momentum.

So after our look at the installation of Windows 8 on our Asus EEE Slate EP 121 we have gotten through the mess of installing drivers that are not meant for our device and getting some basic applications installed. We are now ready to take a look at the Metro UI and some of the features built into the Windows 8 platform. Let’s kick off with how fast this new OS starts up from a cold boot.