An Arm and a Windows

The Windows 8/RT App Store is slowly gaining some momentum, but as I stated earlier it's a little tough to tell what the real "must have" apps are.

Let's start by getting the obvious ones out of the way:
* Skype is truly a home run for Windows RT. I've used it a bunch so that my parents in Minnesota and sister in California can see our son. I'd say this is one of those apps that make you forget and sometimes even loathe the desktop version
* Netflix - again, the minimalist design and user interface of this app is what the original Netflix.com website is trying to accomplish, but better
* Google/Bing apps - in the end these two apps are basically just front pages that will lead you back to Internet Explorer, but they have a couple of extra features that make them nice to have: instant previews, search by speech, image previews, what's trending, etc.
* Kindle - need I say more?

Okay, now for my personal top 5:

• First, Merry Christmas to MS! The Good News: Employees have begun receiving their free Surfaces. That's good news for the rest of us as that brings an additional 94,000 Surfaces online, many of which are going to be used by skilled programmers and people who work with said skilled programmers. I'm hoping for a flood of awesome apps in the next few months.
• More good news: More RT devices are on the way. HTC and perhaps even Nokia are going to be producing RT tablets in the near future 
• Okay, now for the bad news: Google's not planning on making ANY apps for Windows 8, AND they're pulling support for ActiveSync. Does anyone else out there feel like this is like when two of your friends break up and you have to start choosing who to hang out with?

• So...does that mean consumers should wait for Surface 4?
• It sounds like the MS is going to sell around 500,000 to 600,000 Surfaces by Christmas. It's not anywhere close to the 1st Gen iPad's pace of 1,000,000 in a month. I think the author's right: 1) the iPad was a game changer that filled a need the world didn't even know it had. 2) Slow starts don't spell failure: just look at the XBOX. At the time it came out the PS2 and N64 were the unquestioned leaders of the field. Over time, however, MS stayed at the table, competing and adapting until it had secured its place.
• I really can't say I know better, but it's looking more and more like 2 moves really hurt the Surface's debut: 1) choosing to initially sell the Surface only through the MS store, and 2) not bundling the keyboard at the $499 price point (everyone loves a good deal: let's not forget the iPad 1st gen came out at $499 and was a game changer...Google knew that it couldn't just copy Apple, and so it wisely chose to go with a different size and much lower price point...MS could have taken its own share of the market by bundling the keyboard at the $499 or $399 price point...hm...$399 for an RT device with keyboard? Sounds awfully familiar...)

So I read via Slashdot that the head of Dell's consumer business, Jeff Clarke, announced at the Dell World conference that the company would be pulling out of the smartphone business in order to focus on tablets, and specifically Windows 8 tablets.

As the article that Slashdot linked to states, this is a move that makes plenty of sense, as Dell has struggled to keep up with power players like LG and Samsung in the smartphone/Android world, while it's first major foray into the Windows 8 world, the XPS12, has gotten some pretty solid reviews (and gets featured in Windows 8 commercials because of its cool swiveling screen).

Why swim upstream when you really don't have to, right?

In my mind not only is this great news for folks like me who see the potential of devices like the XPS10 and Surface to run Windows on tablet-friendly ARM based platforms, I think it's pretty savvy on Dell's part. Android and iOS are just too different from Windows to really be fully compatible, especially in the workplace. As long as Microsoft can continue to work at making Windows 8 and RT devices fully compatible with existing work networks and software, RT devices could quickly outpace their older Android and iOS siblings, at least at work.

No, I don't think the Surface is a superior tablet to the iPad, or even the Nexus 7. ICS and iOS just have it beat right now, not only because of their greater app selection, but also because of their polished UIs. With that said, I always had this feeling like I needed some genius app or mobile developer to link my Android devices with the rest of my computing world.

The Surface truly feels different. I haven't figured out the exact way I want everything to fit together (getting more cloud sync ability would be helpful to that end) in my personal tech ecosystem, but I'm already a step ahead of where I was with my Android devices, even though I've owned my RT device for a far shorter period of time.

The Asus TF600T Vivo Tab is being bundled right now with a keyboard docking station (which includes a separate battery that effectively doubles your time before needing to charge) at Microsoft brick and mortar stores for $399, or $200 less than retail. Click here for the slickdeals post.

I stopped by our local Microsoft store and they still have a few available. This would make a GREAT Christmas gift for someone interested in a Windows RT device. It's a little lighter than the Surface, and the screen's a little smaller (11x7 on the Surface vs 10.5x6.75 on the Vivo), but really what you walk away with for $399 is an ultraportable touchscreen laptop. When you close the keyboard on the Vivo it's quite a different feel and look from the Surface. Instead of a cover that also serves as a keyboard and touchpad, you have a genuine dock that adds the battery, keyboard, touchpad, and USB port. Closed you feel like you're holding an extremely thin netbook, or a mini ultrabook.

I'm posting a few pics here of how the Surface and Vivo look side by side.




Just for the sake of consumer objectivity, I'm linking to a less than flattering, but very informative review of the Vivo here. Like most Surface reviews, it's colored heavily by the reviewers opinion of RT's prospects.

Long story short, get the Vivo at a Microsoft store and you end up saving yourself $200 and walking away with a device comparable to if not superior to the Surface w/ Touch Pad Cover.

So as a Vikings fan living in Seahawks country I really don't get many opportunities to watch my favorite team play. With that in mind, I decided to pay for NFL Rewind, a service that basically DVRs every NFL game and keeps them available throughout the season for replay. For the first time in I don't know how long I've seen pretty much every snap the Vikings have played (why I subject to myself to this kind of torture is a completely different question...Seahawks fans are not that far removed from knowing what I'm talking about).

The thing about NFL Rewind is that it doesn't really work on mobile browsers. If you've paid for the subscription you can download a free viewing app on iOS or *some* Android devices, but that leads me to a point that I think a lot of reviewers (besides Tom's Hardware of course!) are missing: by far one of the most underrated aspects of Windows RT is the fact that you can view nearly every webpage on your tablet as you would on IE running on Windows 7 or 8. Hulu, NFL Rewind, Pandora...they all come in precisely as they would on a regular Windows 8 device (reviewers have commented that IE on RT only supports Flash on pre-screened sites, but so far I haven't run into any problems). It is genuinely nice to be able to have the full desktop browser experience on an ARM based tablet and not have to think about switching back and forth between the browser and finding the appropriate apps.

Now if that's one of the most underrated aspects of RT, then Microsoft would do well to reconsider icing out Firefox and Chrome. I get that IE doesn't want to give up any ground to competing browsers, but you could definitely slow down the steady stream of complaints regarding the lack of apps in the Windows App Store by making truly every web application available via Chrome and Firefox. I'm an Asana user, and the fact that it doesn't run on IE is almost keeping me from making the full switch from my notebook to the Surface.

A few weeks ago over at Shiny Surface I saw a post titled, "A better way to find great Windows Store apps."  The title sounded promising to say the least. The Windows Store is not only underpopulated, as someone who'd gotten used to Google Play I missed seeing what other users downloaded after viewing a certain app, as well as apps that were related to the app that I was looking at.

The Great Windows App site that the SS post was about ended up being something like what I was looking for. The site uses an automated process to remove obviously poor apps.

1. First the process excludes any apps that use the default Windows Store icon (a sign that the developer was too lazy to even design their own custom icon or company logo). 
2. Second, they exclude any app that chooses both a dark font and tile since no one in their right mind would create such a hard to read tile. 
3. Third, they exclude any app that has a live tile designed in MS Paint...both because installing such an app would make your home screen look terrible, as well as the fact that such poor effort at presentation (are we sensing a theme here?) probably indicates a poor app as well. 
4. Finally, a really short app description is also grounds for automatic exclusion as any developer who really cared about their app and wanted people to use it would do their best to put their heart into a helpful description. 
5. After doing all that, the site then uses a couple of other filters to weed out any other terrible apps that might have passed the first four automatic excluders. 

I'd have to say it's a pretty ingenious concept. Perhaps the only thing I don't like is the heavy emphasis on tile design. On Google Play, especially in the earlier Android 1.5 years some of the greatest apps had the crudest icons. I have less of a problem with their focus on English, though I think that could lead to some incredible apps being missed. Kakao Talk, for example, is a Korean developed app. If users had had to wait for it to get a full English description they'd have missed out for awhile on one of Android's most useful and popular apps.

The site hasn't led me to any incredible apps yet, but I made it my homepage on IE10 with the thought that I'll check it pretty regularly whenever I'm hunting for a new app.

All in all it's a must-have bookmark/IE pin for any Windows RT user.

If you're interested in the Surface RT but still aren't sure, there's no better place to go than Tom's Hardware for a detailed and useful review of the device. In fact, after having used the Surface myself I'd say with little hesitation that the review on TH is the next best thing to owning a Surface for a week or two (and perhaps even longer given the extensive benchmarking TH does as part of their standard review). Andrew Ku's two part review that covers everything from Windows RT, chip performance, browser and display benchmarks, battery life, and much, much more.

Some highlights:

"Thus far, though, we've generally regarded tablets as toys. Well, perhaps not toys in a literal sense, but we typically use them around our houses for playing mainstream games, browsing the Web, listening to music, and watching video. Those are all very common tasks, but they aren't productivity-oriented...Tons of me-too products have found their way their way through our lab. The Nexus 7 was the one we liked most. But it remains a pure tablet. Even if it's more comfortable to hold than a big 10"+ model, more affordable than anything Apple could conceive, and part of a mature software ecosystem in Google Play, there are certain things it just doesn't do...And then the Surface dropped into our lab...Suddenly we had many of the luxuries we enjoy on the desktop. Only, we were using a tablet. Wait, whaaat? It immediately became possible to do things and work in ways that simply hadn't been possible previously."

"With the few things we dislike aside, we continue to be bullish about using Microsoft's Surface as a replacement for the Ultrabooks and MacBook Airs we carry around with us to trade shows and meetings, along with the tablets we use around the house when we get home." 

Full review here:
Part 1: Performance and Display Benchmarks
Part 2: Battery Life, Multi-Monitor, and More