Microsoft’s strategic shift into a “Devices and Services” company saw the release of its own hardware range, under the “Surface” moniker, which was previously donned by the touchscreen tables, now called Pixel Sense. The Surface devices were tablets meant to show case Windows at its finest form. The Surface RT and the Surface Pro have seen two iterations already, with the former running on powerful ARM processors, while the latter, running on Ultrabook-grade specifications, meant to give high performance in a portable touchscreen form factor. Suffice to say, both of them have been met only with lukewarm response. With mini tablets gaining a large foothold, even Apple acknowledged the need with its iPad mini, and several OEM partners of Microsoft started releasing their own 8 inch Windows 8.1 tablets, once the OS was ready to support smaller screens. And now, it seems like Microsoft is ready to show the world what it can do with a smaller screen, on May 20th, as the company plans to reveal a new Surface device, at an event in New York city.
Microsoft is expected to release a 8 inch Surface device, much like the ones that are going around in the market since last year. We hope to see something like the Lenovo Thinkpad 8, with a high resolution screen and may be wacom support, like the ASUS Vivotab Note. There have been rumours that Microsoft is planning to show case the stylus functionality specifically with use cases such as OneNote, to spur student adoption, but we are not sure whether this will mean x86 Windows or Windows RT. While Microsoft would want to use Windows RT to push adoption, we think a x86 version makes more sense, as we have seen with the other 8 inch tablets. Only problem we have seen with these kinds of tablets, for example, the Dell Venue 8 Pro, is the battery life that worsens after a point of time. If Microsoft can do what the other OEMs can’t, we might very well have a decent tablet alternative to the Nexus 7 and the Apple iPad mini, which currently rule the mini-tablet market.
via Engadget