Submitted by “This may be a good sign for Microsoft: a little over a day after putting its new Surface RT tablet up for pre-order, the entry-level $499 version of the tablet has sold out. Its estimated shipping time has slipped from October 26, Windows 8’s release date, to a more nebulous ‘within three weeks’.” We’ll see. Wouldn’t be the first time a company artificially keeps supply short to generate ‘sold-out’ hype.
MS limited “numbers” for sale to 3 mln this year.
And lets face it, its THE WinRT tablet. Anyone who want to have Win on ARM (why is beyond me
) will go to pre order.
I think that numbers will be below 100k. Like 10% of 1 mln. Like 3 months left of this year with 3mln year sales as MS target.
No, this is actually THE Windows RT tablet. WinRT stands for Windows Runtime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_RT
Welcome to the new Microsoft naming strategy.
the break with win32 on RT might prove to be a very good move in the long run. Devices where battery preservation is critical, are not served with lazily ported Windows applications.
Yes, this means there will not be a large number of apps in the beginning, but if these tables sell reasonably well this won’t be a problem for very long.
DOSguy,
“the break with win32 on RT might prove to be a very good move in the long run. Devices where battery preservation is critical, are not served with lazily ported Windows applications.”
Do you have evidence that battery preservation is a problem with win32s in the first place? It’s a serious question since I’ve never seen anyone back this assertion with real data. At their core, win32 apps are event oriented, meaning that they generally only consume CPU when they’re interacted with. Unless a developer has used a bad practice of polling, it’s not at all clear to me how switching the API will help save the battery.
I might believe the possibility that bad practices are rampant on win32s, however even there I’d have to question this argument’s validity since the win32 software I use rarely consumes CPUs in the background unless it’s a daemon designed to do so.
If you’re talking about foreground apps, there’s nothing really preventing a metro app from wasting CPU.
If you’re talking about background apps, there’s no reason the OS could not have a policy to completely suspend or significantly reduce CPU to win32 apps in the background. Well behaved win32 GUI apps would not be affected during background suspension. I’d even expect the majority of “poorly” behaving win32 apps (like a ray tracer) to wake up and resume in the foreground without a hiccup.
My point is, I don’t think there’s any overwhelmingly strong technical reason a power policy for metro apps could not be applied towards win32 ones. And I’ve never seen any evidence to show that the new APIs are somehow more efficient. I don’t want to assert that they are not, but I definitely need to see solid data before accepting that they are.
I agree about Windows on ARM being useless. I just don’t see the long term advantages.
Look at Intels roadmap over the next few years and you’ll see them rapidly scaling down power consumption and scaling up GPU performance to erase ARM’s advantage.
Intel’s SoC designs also incorporate connected stand-by which means that Win8 tabs with those chips will have decent battery life. If they can get even eight hours out of a charge then its already mostly close enough. (Note: This applies to Atom SoC designs only, not high end Win8 tabs with Core i7’s)
I don’t think Win32 will go away fast enough for Windows RT to outsell Windows 8. I think that in the long run, people will have their tablets be the center of their digital life and just dock them to output to a monitor, and use Bluetooth keyboards and mice to get productive stuff done.
Intel will win the architecture war. I have full faith in their expertise and their leads in fab technology.
Intel should be able to get some market share with their mobile processors, but they’ve got a snowballs chance in hell of becoming the dominant processor architecture for mobiles.
In order for them to win they’d have to convince the manufacturers of phones/tablets to limit themselves to a single manufacturer (since Intel own the x86 arch, to my knowledge the only others allowed to make x86 arch processors are AMD and VIA). So, they’d limit themselves to giving a monopoly to Intel where they can price gouge them versus the very competitive ARM market where you’ve got various fabs and manufacturers competing against each other making ARM processors.
Plus there’s more than ARM: if ARM Ltd. would start to be unbearable one way or another, MIPS for example could swoop in easily – MIPS chips are also quite popular in ~embedded (just not in mobiles; XBurst close – in tablets), and PRC even supposedly builds its tech independence on MIPS Loongson chips.
Intel roadmap included, not a long time ago, also 10 GHz Netburst CPUs. And in ~embedded, Intel was supposed to “erase ARM’s advantage” one or two times already…
Thing is, ARM doesn’t stand still, and has many players heavily invested in it, and will offer more integrated, tailored to every imaginable usage scenario (it’s about vast number of manufacturers) & less expensive solutions.
Intel can’t and won’t provide this, process lead is not so significant when you want to have low cost (where older processes are fine) with simply adequate performance, limited mostly by screen and radio module vs battery tech.
And there’s more than ARM, also MIPS for example…
BTW, in early Intel presentations of Atom SoC there was a block cryptically named ~”32bit RISC system controller” in the ~southbridge …I wonder what that was. Also, Infineon (acquired by Intel) radio modules certainly still use ARM cores.
Which means that in an “Intel inside” mobile phone there very well might be more ARM cores than x86 ones.
Those are as many tablets Microsoft’s OEM are not gonna sell.
Too bad, suckers. Shouldn’t have relied on Microsoft.
What is the alternative? Android? Where they’ve collectively sold like 10 tablets?
OEMs are going to sell more Windows 8/Windows RT tablets than Android tablets. Fast.
I expect within a year that Android will be completely defeated in the high end tablet space.
Sure there will be the Kindle Fire, Nexus 7, Nooks, and the shitty Chinese tabs they sell down the block, but that will be the niche Android is forced into.
40% market share for Android tablets.
Nice twist. I was speaking about the premium market. Not the sub $200 tablet market that no one but Android really competes in.
A great, great majority of those are Kindle Fires and Nooks. If it even reaches 40% market share world wide I don’t know, but I’d be incredibly surprised given that Kindle Fire is US only. I’d wager its something half that.
In other words, incompatible forks of Android which don’t directly benefit Google.
When speaking about viable alternatives .. its not like ASUS or HP or somebody can just license the Kindle Fire, or necessarily replicate their success with vanilla Android.
Android has been utterly and completely beaten into submission at iPad price ranges, the premium market.
Windows 8 is the only alternative.
They run Android applications just fine. They can run Android-proper just fine. How are they incompatible?
Windows 8 is a clusterfcuk. Nobody is going to want to fcuk about with the desktop on a tablet.
Been using it for a development environment for some times now Thom and it works perfectly fine.
I know you don’t like it, but clusterf–k it is not.
Edited 2012-10-18 18:34 UTC
Personally I use this for my Development Environment, it works perfectly fine and in not a cluster either:
COPY CON > PROGRAM.EXE
Obvious troll is obvious.
They don’t run any app using any kind of recent Android SDK. IIRC, the Android version that Amazon forked at is Gingerbread which is prior to Android tablet apps.
What exactly does this mean? It means that the #1 selling “Android” tablet, does nothing to further the Android ecosystem as a whole.
Speaking of clusterfuck. How anyone puts up with the absolute BULLSHIT that is an Android tablet is BEYOND me. That thing is such an inconsistent, slow, piece of garbage that I can’t even fathom how anyone is not as irritated as I was with the poor experience.
Windows 8 is an infinitely smoother experience.
Well, I wanted a tablet because I wanted to be able to easily and comfortably read books and comics on-the-go, watch movies and do web-browsing. Also, I wanted the ability to run any apps of my choosing on the device so an iPad was not suitable for my needs. In my use my tablet hasn’t been anything like you describe, but then again, I don’t have an axe to grind or the need to try and bash other peoples’ tastes unlike certain others here.
After dropping $400 on a slow, buggy, unusable piece of GARBAGE, I think I have the right to complain about my experience.
It is appalling that they let tablets like this into the market. Makes me wonder if execs at Google just use iPads, because surely they can’t tolerate this shit.
Even tried putting CM on it, only to find even buggier ROMS with broken GPS, WiFi, or what have you.
So go ahead, enjoy the fact that you can run SSH or your HTTP server or whatever on your tablet, but I can’t deal with such a shitty experience.
Just wondering : did you compare both OSs running on similar hardware ?
I’m asking because AFAIK there’s only a handful of ARM Windows 8 tablets and x86 Android tablets around right now, so finding one Android tablet and one Windows 8 tablet that share a single SoC for comparison purposes sounds difficult.
Edited 2012-10-19 09:05 UTC
No, I didn’t compare them on the same hardware. However, it is easy to get the gist for the dramatic differences.
Android isn’t just slightly laggy, or a little sluggish, it is PITIFULLY slow. This just shouldn’t happen. Period.
The Windows 8 tablet I use is the Acer W500. (W7 tab upgraded to W8). You can look up the specs and draw your own conclusions, but it is incredibly smooth.
Also most impressions I’ve seen online from Windows RT tablets show that the smoothness has carried over to their ARM SoC designs as well.
However, a comparison I can make is my Lumia 800 and my brothers Galaxy Nexus. There is just no comparison. The lower specced Lumia blows the Nexus out of the water in smoothness. Even with a CM’d JellyBean ROM.
Again, highly unscientific but make of it what you wish.
Sure, but I have heard that there is such a dramatic difference in performance and battery life between Intel and ARM chips. This is why I don’t know if such data can be relied on yet.
But again, is Android itself to blame, or is it the crap hardware and software which many OEM have the bad habit of bundling with it ?
I ask this because I have this cheap Sony Xperia Mini Pro phone, whose hardware is quite dated by modern standards (1 GHz single-core Snapdragon, 512 MB RAM). With both the original Sony GB rom and the current CM9 ROM, it does display a bit of lag here and there, but nothing which I would consider pitiful or painful, except in apps that have just been started and are likely still loading in the background.
(In fact, most of the lag which I have encountered on Android so far seems to be caused by a NAND I/O bottleneck during various parts of processes’ lifecycle, something which Google’s recent obsession with graphics performance is unlikely to fix… But I digress.)
Since we obviously do not have the same experience of Android, I am wondering why, and my bet was that either you have dealt with a newer version of Android that ran on inappropriately old hardware or you have met some awful OEM/carrier customization. And it may also be that I hold my phones to lower standards than you.
Again, I don’t feel comfortable comparing x86 specs with ARM specs. But 2 GB of RAM would be a lot for an ARM device, and it’s only been a bit more than a year since popular Android tablets have had dual-core 1 GHz processors : I don’t know if your evaluation of Android’s performance is this fresh.
Most Windows RT tablets which I have heard about are quite powerful by ARM standards. But while looking this up, I’ve found something interesting : the Surface RT and Asus’ Transformer Prime have very similar hardware, so it should be possible to draw valid comparisons between both once the former is out !
AFAIK, Lumia 800 still run Windows Phone 7, which is itself based on Windows CE. I will probably teach you nothing by mentioning that CE is not based on modern Windows, and is a somewhat more crude OS targeted towards embedded stuff where things like modern hardware abstractions and security features have been rejected in favor so as to get some extra performance on slow hardware.
Windows Phone 8, on its side, is based on Windows NT, like desktop Windows, so it should be a full-featured modern OS on the inside, and as a drawback require more horsepower. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft’s team will still manage to make Windows Phone work faster than Android with this heavier core, congratulations to them if they do.
Well, I have nothing against unscientific opinions, my problem is when they are used to state adamant things about OSs as fact.
If I said “Windows 7 sucks balls, look how slow it is on this Acer laptop with shitty hardware and a boatload of bundled crapware”, you would be right to tell me that it is not necessarily Windows that is to blame. Every other OS should probably be held to the same standards.
Edited 2012-10-19 18:37 UTC
Maybe against the high end Core i7s, but I think Intel’s Atom SoC isn’t that much faster. Again, not sure.
My experiences were as follows:
– Force closes in the browser. Or just moments on non responsiveness which cause the App Not Responding dialog to pop up. Highly annoying
– 1-2 second delay when switching between apps. It makes the experience really jarring.
– Lag while scrolling through home screens and widgets absolutely killed performance (Which erases a lot of Android’s real potential imo)
Don’t get me wrong. When it was zippy (usually after fresh restart) it was actually pretty cool. Plenty of widgets all pulling data from all my favorite sources.
But when it was slow, it was very frustrating. I flashed JB using CM10 on it and touch responsiveness got better..if just a little flaky and then my WiFi started acting up so I had to revert back to stock.
I did test Stock AOSP Android though vs ASUS OEM customization and there was little perceptible difference in performance (From a responsiveness POV). It still lagged in the key areas above.
I would agree with the “OEMs not Android” bit, but every phone/tablet I’ve used (save for the absolutely beautiful Galaxy S III, but thats a powerhouse) has been unpleasant.
That’s interesting, and speaks to the fact that
performance is multifaceted.
Well my Tablet came with Honeycomb on it. That was terrible. Borderline unusable. The ASUS ICS ROM always had random reboots so I flashed CM9 with ICS and it worked well for a little while..but still had nagging perf issues (Though not nearly as bad as HC)
I put JB on it using CM10 but had the aforementioned WiFi issues and flaky touch response (Multiple touch points registering erratically)
Well my tablet had a Tegra 2 I believe. IIRC that had multiple cores.
Definitely will be interested in seeing Windows RT vs Windows 8 performance, and vs Android in general.
I’ll accept that, though I question to what extent does CE mitigate the performance impact?
I also wonder how Android’s multitasking comes into play, since it is a conscious design decision.
I had limited eyes on time with the Lumia 920 (and they only showed us limited features) but it seemed smooth. Even faster than my Lumia 800.
Remains to be seem if its at a battery life cost, or anything like that.
I would think since they share a core with Windows 8, that Microsoft heavily optimized the NT Kernel to make it run well on mobile phones. I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks.
I mean, this was my experience YMMV, and if I made it seem to be true in every instance, then that was not my intention. In fact I will say that the Galaxy S III is a pretty smooth experience save for a few minor things. I am in love with the screen though.
I have no idea what was wrong, but I do not get anything like what you’re describing on either my tablet or my phone, nor does my roomie have anything like that on his phone; they are all snappy, there are no force-closes and there is no lag of the kind you describe. There is a delay between switching apps if the one I switch to has been closed while I was using other apps, but to be honest, I just do not find that a terribly big an issue.
Indeed, that is quite a bit more serious than what I encounter on my side. I didn’t try out CM10 yet because from the bug tracker of the Freexeria team, I got that the builds for my device still have serious issues (like non-functional keyboard keys), but CM9 worked fine for me save for the occasional lag.
Perhaps a hardware problem somewhere, then, but also…
…as I said earlier, you might hold your phones to higher standards than me, since I never even considered spending more than 300€ (off-contract) on those
Yeah, I would have advised sticking with CM9 for now too. For my device, the delay for getting a reasonably stable and snappy CM build is about 6 months, and it might be the same for you.
If it’s the original Transformer, as I guessed from the rest of your post, it has a dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM, so only x86-ARM differences should come into play.
Sorry, this is as far as my own knowledge of WP and Android will take you
All I can say is that CM9 allows to tune multitasking behaviour on the scale from “kill apps when they leave the screen” to “keep as much running apps as possible”, and that one my phone, the best performance is achieved when I keep as much running processes as possible.
Which is logical in a way : I have already noticed that NAND I/O seems slow on this device, so I shouldn’t be surprised that having to reload apps from flash would cause extra lag.
Indeed, there will probably be quite a few comparative reviews around once WP8 is officially out.
Wow, you have tested ALL of them to come to this conclusion. Absolutely awesome, thanks for your hard work.
WinCE (not W2k) XP, Vista, W7 tablet share combined: <1%. So, yeah, W8 will conquer.
Edited 2012-10-18 17:35 UTC
I remember about a year or so ago you saying that there was absolutely no way the iPad would have dominant tablet market share a year hence. This was said in the context of an expectation and projection that Android tablets would overtake the iPad in market share.
So what went wrong?
Technically, 40% isn’t “dominant.”
Of course, 60% isn’t exactly dominant, either, if the other 40% belongs to one platform.
Actually it is if the other parties are less than 40% non-combined.
Citation? I don’t mean to be snarky, I’m genuinely curious.
OEMs are going to sell more Windows 8/Windows RT tablets than Android tablets. Fast. – depends on the country. Don’t see it selling at $500 in India. If nexus 7 and iPad mini comes around $300 it would make surface doa here
Of course, this pre-order sell out only scratches the… um… outside or top of an object…
It still an encouraging start. Oh well, the haters are going to hate.
Balmer probably bought them.
Why can’t you Open source nutters stop infecting every bloody thread that mentions Microsoft?
*You ain’t funny
*You ain’t clever
You Microsoft Fanbois “Keepin’ it real!” are?
Not in the least.
I am hardly an Microsoft fanboy, I buy OpenBSD releases 😉
Your history of comment suggest otherwise
I play devil’s advocate a lot of the time and actually correct some of the ridiculous things which are usually said.
If the surface does well … then everyone will be claiming that Microsoft abused their monopoly position.
Evidently, you’ve not been around more than 4 years in the industry.
Microsoft can’t help themselves to NOT use it.
Sorry, you are just being intentionally naive.
No I was making a statement about how FOSS advocates change the goalposts when Linux doesn’t do well on consumer computing devices such as laptops and desktops.
I don’t care if Microsoft leverage their monopoly … I worked with proper vendor lock-in (bespoke closed source applications by a third party that would do as little work as possible) and anything Microsoft do is no where near as bad as what I have experienced.
Do us a favour and spend 3 months coding in a html text box and the the System not giving you any feedback whether you have or have not done something correctly … and then complain about their monopoly.
Edited 2012-10-18 19:31 UTC
Not everyone. I really have no interest in seeing it fail any more than I have in seeing it succeed. I find it somewhat silly how so many people choose one extreme or the other
This is precisely how I feel about it. I tend to play devil’s advocate a lot of here … and a lot of the anti-Microsoft stuff gets old.
We joke about it a lot at work. I joke about how I hate Macs and Linux … and the guys joke about how I am Bill Gates’s right hand man.
Also I didn’t mean everyone literally.
Edited 2012-10-18 19:58 UTC
I’ll go a step further and say I find it absolutely silly (to put it nicely) that people emotionally attach themselves, much like a parasite does, to these companies. People act as if they actually have a physical relationship or rivalry. It’s beyond me why people choose to be such thin-skinned cheerleaders one way or the other. All of these companies have both good and bad qualities so to pledge allegiance to one while decrying another is nothing short of hypocritical.
Naturally but either way, saying “We sold out all our stock but, eh, we’re not telling how much that actually was” is rather suspicious. It’s all rather incredibly obvious and stupid so maybe it’s just an oversight.
When you manufacture only a handful it’s easy to “sell out”, artificially “creating” a demand for a product that would have otherwise bombed. Why else would MS not give numbers on how many they built.
i want a lumia 920….