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0 pointshosay12313y ago0 comments

Windows has supported gestures and handwriting recognition for years, and the Pro comes with a stylus. To say a keyboard is critical seems a gross overstatement.

As for use cases, how about: it's a tablet, without the regular complexities of 'tablet mode'. It runs the same stuff as your desktop, acts, smells, barks and looks just like your desktop, and if you want to use it like a crippled toy in the style of an iPad, you're free to use the metro apps.

Let us also not be too quick to forget that Microsoft were the first to seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience. They're the only company (out of two runners, really) with a serious story in this department. Waiting with bated breath to see if Apple wholesale copies the Microsoft approach, toy-apps-as-start-button works wonderfully.

0 comments

rimantas13y ago

You put a lot of effort to get it backwards.

  > it's a tablet, without the regular complexities
  > of 'tablet mode'

No, it is a table with added complexities of desktop mode.

  > It runs the same stuff as your desktop, acts, smells, barks and looks just like your desktop

Except your desktop expects you to interact with keyboard and pointer device not with you touch. And there it all fails apart.

  > if you want to use it like a crippled toy in the style of an iPad

The words you were looking for are "use it optimised for touch, as iPad".

  > Microsoft were the first to seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience

And were seriously unsuccessful at it.

  > Waiting with bated breath to see if Apple wholesale copies the Microsoft approach,
  > toy-apps-as-start-button works wonderfully.

What's the logic behind that? Microsoft "seriously meld the desktop and tablet experience" and it fails. Apple launches iPad with "crippled toy style" and it is wildly successful. No somehow Apple should copy Microsoft's approach which failed?

hosay123OP13y ago

A desktop expects input devices, yes, but also there has been a wonderful need to accommodate disabled people for decades prior to the whole tablet thing, and so all modern desktops have great support for auxiliary input devices, and in the case of business software some of it is even legally mandated in order to sell to government. Microsoft has had a great built-in framework for touch/stylus driven input since Windows XP (2001).

The end result is that an on-screen keyboard or gesture input is just as capable of driving desktop software, and it's been that way for a very long time. If any aspect of the experience is suboptimal, it would be tiny widget sizes that are unaccommodating to thumb-sized input. But that's covered by inclusion of a stylus.

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