Items tagged with windows rt
It's starting to seem like Microsoft is a glutton for punishment. The fact that the Redmond company's foray with Windows RT fizzled before it could even get started -- something all-too-real for those who had enough faith in Microsoft to purchase an equipped device -- isn't a surprise at all. Today, it seems few people who bought into Windows RT feel like it was worth it, and the fact that Microsoft didn't even bother porting Windows 10 to the platform is proof that it was just a lost cause. But, a lost cause might be temporary, and based on a new job listing posted by Microsoft, one mere lost cause isn't enough to shelve an idea forever. Microsoft's Surface RT, running Windows RT In this job...
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We learned last month that Microsoft would be rolling out a Start menu update to Windows RT devices, and today, that update has arrived. When Microsoft’s Windows 10 FAQ was previously updated, it wasn't clear what the update would entail; it was up in the air whether or not the new Start menu would take on the likeness of the one in Windows 10. Now, we can see that for the most part, it has. Certain options are missing from the left side of this Start menu, but it's a faithful recreation of the menu in Microsoft's latest (and probably greatest) OS. This does raise a couple of intriguing points, though. When Windows 8 came out, many said that the full-screen Start...
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Microsoft’s well-intentioned, but ultimately doomed Windows RT operating system (and the accompanying Surface and Surface 2 tablets) is one of Microsoft’s most high-profile boondoggles in recent memory. Initially developed as a somewhat low-cost answer to iPad and Android tablets, tablets running Windows RT never really took off with consumers (while the Surface Pro 2 and Surface Pro 3 tablets have seen much greater adoption). Microsoft saw the writing on the wall and discontinued the Surface 2 earlier this year. Although most in the tech community didn’t shed a tear over this announcement, it was a blow to those that bought into Microsoft’s ARM-based Windows operating system. Surface RT and...
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Back in May, Microsoft revealed that it wouldn't be bringing Windows 10 to its RT devices, including the Surface RT line. While it wasn't that surprising, it was still a bummer for those who gave Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and picked up an RT device in its earlier days. Well, it seems now that not all hope is lost for those RT faithfuls. In the Windows 10 FAQ, of all places, there's a point made about Windows RT devices: "If you’re running Windows RT, your device won’t upgrade to Windows 10. We will have an update available in September 2015 that will improve the Start menu and lock screen. Check Windows Update on your Windows RT device to make sure it is ready to download the update...
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The reports were true, and it looks as though Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 is about to get a new baby brother. After Microsoft quietly discontinued the Surface 2 earlier this year, we were eager to see what Microsoft had in store for its successor. Some thought that maybe Microsoft would just leave the entry-level Windows tablet market to third-party OEMs, but as we are seeing today, that is clearly not the case. So we present to you the Surface 3, a tablet that will slot in under its Surface Pro 3 both in size an in performance. The dominant feature of the Surface 3 is of course its 10.8-inch 1920x1280 display that now features a 3:2 ratio compared to 16:9 for the Surface 3. Under the hood, an...
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A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year. "Microsoft is about to take the ax to one of the stupidest products it ever created.", says CNN Money - a sentiment that will be shared by many. Windows RT was always a strange experiment, but there were still many out there who...
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Straight out of the "It's about time!" files comes an FCC filing that suggests Microsoft could soon be unveiling an LTE-equipped Surface 2 tablet, and as boring as that might sound, it holds a lot of importance. Plus, there's a couple of fun things to speculate on. For starters, let's not ignore the fact that the lacking of an LTE Surface tablet could have been hurting Microsoft's potential sales, given LTE-equipped Android and iOS models have existed for a while. Not everyone needs wireless coverage on their tablet, but those that do would have dropped Surface out of the running immediately. Second, what makes this FCC filing even more interesting is that measurements seen in the above example...
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In a way, the future of Microsoft and its Windows platform is wide open right now. The way Microsoft's devices and services chief Jule Larson-Green sees it, we're on the cusp of a new era of computing and user interaction. Speaking at the UBS Global Technology Summit, Larson-Green talked about how user interaction with technology evolves through different inflection points. In computing's early days, the mouse served as a major inflection point, and if you were a software vendor, you either took advantage of that fact or you became obsolete like WordPerfect did. After the mouse came touch computing, which presented an opportunity for Apple to race in front of the competition. "We had smartphones,...
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Now that Microsoft has fully consumed Nokia's mobile product division, this could go down as one of the final pieces of hardware to ever ship with the Nokia brand name on it. After years of catering solely to the smartphone market, Nokia has extended the reach of the Lumia line to cover tablets, too. The Lumia 2520 is one of the more eye-catching Windows 8.1 RT slates on the market, shipping with a full copy of Office 2013 Home & Student as well as Outlook RT. The tablet will be shipping to Verizon stores on November 21st, replete with 4G LTE and an off-contract price of $500. That's impressive for one major reason: it wasn't too long ago that tablets were being sold for nearly as much on-contract,...
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Microsoft's Surface 2 became available for purchase at retail earlier this week and we've had an eval unit in-hand for testing since the day before launch. Powered by NVIDIA's new quad-core Tegra 4 SoC, and driven by Windows 8.1 RT, the Surface 2 offers stiff competition to the recently announced iPad Air. From a total package perspective, Microsoft throws in a 200GB of SkyDrive cloud storage, free Skype landline calling for 2 years and 1 year of all you can eat Skype WiFi at available hot spots. So you get all that, for $150 less (comparable 32GB Surface 2 pricing at $449) than an iPad Air at $599. The new iPad has its super high res Retina display (and a 64-bit A7 processor), which no doubt...
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It was really in Microsoft's best interest to make sure that its Windows 8.1 launch last week went off without a hitch, but that didn't quite become the case. Over the weekend, reports started to trickle out of device brickings involving Surface RT tablets. Select issues reportedly also plagued a few random Windows 8 Pro installs, such as the one with the ASUS Transformer Book we just posted a preview of, but that problem wasn't as wide spread as what was experienced with Windows RT. To those with bricked Surface RT tablets: A solution has arrived. There's just one downside: The fix is a complex process, sure to be considered ridiculously tedious even for the PC pro. An instruction PDF is made...
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Several of Microsoft's hardware partners have pulled out of the Windows RT race, but one company that's determined to see this thing to the end is Nokia. The Finnish phone and tablet maker, and Microsoft's best buddy as of late, is reportedly going to launch a 10.1-inch Windows RT tablet called Sirius. Paul Thurrott over at WinSupersite rather emphatically states that the rumors are true, that he's been able to confirm not only the existence of Sirius, but several hardware specs as well. Image Source: digi-wo.com According to Thurrott, Sirius will come ARMed with a quad-core Qualcomm 8974 architecture, 1920x1080 IPS display with "outdoor readability," 6.7-megapixel rear-facing camera with Carl...
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Sales of Surface RT devices running the Windows RT platform have been giving Microsoft headaches, lately. The reaction from device makers has been varied – some have pushed the devices to the back burner and seem to be waiting to see how things play out before investing more in the scaled-back Windows sibling. Dell took an entirely different approach on Friday, bundling a keyboard with its Dell XPS 10 Tablet. Apparently, Dell is banking on the XPS giving customers a better experience when paired with the keyboard and touchpad. What makes the move noteworthy is that it raises the price of the tablet. If you were to buy the tablet by itself, you’d pay $299, but the cheapest XPS RT system...
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A couple of weeks ago, we reported on some comments made by ASUS' CEO Jonney Shih about Windows RT. Simply put, "The result is not very promising". It's no surprise, then, to learn today that the company has officially decided to pull out of the Windows RT market, and few could blame it. Shih said in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, "It's not only our opinion, the industry sentiment is also that Windows RT has not been successful." It's clear that ASUS has taken a loss thanks to its bet placed on Windows RT, but as has become clear since RT's launch, it's not the hardware that's at fault. Arguments have been made time and time again that the apps available for the platform are far...
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Even Microsoft is having a tough time selling Surface RT tablets built around its Windows RT platform, so where does that leave its hardware partners who adopted the ARM-friendly operating system for their own devices? In a precarious situation, that's where. It's not entirely clear if Windows RT is the problem, or if lower priced Android tablets are stealing the show, but whatever the reason for slow sales, Asus chairman Jonney Shih isn't willing to keep betting on the platform. Shih sat for a spell with All Things D to speak about its tablet strategy and the state of Windows RT devices, saying about the latter, "The result is not very promising." He was referring to both the Surface RT and...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve alongside it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel... ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing In Mobile...
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Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along side it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel. ARM's Licensing and Design Model Most readers are aware that ARM has a very different business model than Intel. Specifically, ARM licenses a wide range of technologies in a vast number of markets. The majority of...
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Microsoft will be pushing Office 2013 into the mobile world with the Windows 8.1 update public preview on June 26th. The company announced today at Computex that small x86 tablets will be available with Microsoft Office 2013 built in. On top of that, Outlook 2013 will be coming to ARM-based Windows RT tablets at the same time. Acer Iconia W3 Right now, Windows RT already supports the core suite of Office, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, an even OneNote. The notable exception was Outlook, which was frustrating for mobile users who relied heavily on the email software. Windows CFO and CMO Tami Reller pointed to the Acer Iconia W3 as one of the new x86 tablets that will include Office Home and...
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Windows RT is an OS that we haven't heard a lot about lately. Windows 8.1, on the other hand, has been all over the news. So, how's Microsoft to get RT back into the fold? Partner with Qualcomm, one of the world's most notable producers of high-end mobile chips. This week at Computex, Qualcomm announced plans to work with Microsoft in order to offer Snapdragon 800 processors for Windows RT 8.1. If you aren't familiar, the Snapdragon 800 processor range features an integrated multimode 3G/4G LTE modem and CPU speeds of up to 2.2 GHz per core.Other capabilities include USB 3.0 and support for Windows RT 8.1 features and services. Qualcomm Technologies and Microsoft will continue to work together...
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Microsoft had a simple formula for competing in the mobile space: Launch a Surface Pro device running Windows 8 for people that need a full fledged system for getting work done yet desire the portability of a tablet, and Surface RT for consumers who are primarily interested in a tablet. In Microsoft's mind, this would also serve as the blueprint for its OEM partners to follow with devices of their own. The only problem with Microsoft's strategy is that consumers aren't flocking to these devices, so what's next? A price cut. Surface RT debuted at $499, a premium price for a tablet made even more expensive by the fact that competition in the Android space keep coming out with lower priced devices....
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It's perhaps the ultimate Catch 22. HTC needs to expand into more frontiers beyond the smartphone one in order to generate more revenue. But it lacks the revenue to expand into new product segments. Years back, HTC actually tried its hand at a tablet. While the device did well in reviews, hardly anyone actually purchased it. Such has been the case with the company's phones of late, too. Samsung has been eating every other Android phone maker alive, swallowing nearly all of the profits for the Android phone segment. As the HTC One attempts to gain traction, the company is reportedly nixing plans to debut a monster 12" Windows RT tablet. Why? It suspects weak demand for Windows RT in general, and...
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There's no reason for Windows 8 and Windows RT to be treated like second class citizens, so why isn't Adobe's free Photoshop Express program available for either platform when you can grab it on iOS or Android? That would have been a good question a week ago, but is no longer valid, as you can now find the freebie photo editing app in Microsoft's Windows Store. "On-the-go photo editing was never so fun, fast, and cool. Touch your way to better-looking pictures with automatic fixes and filters," Adobe explains on the app's product page. "Get your pictures to pop! And after sharing, you'll be the talk of your friends. This isn't like the full version of Photoshop that's available for desktop systems,...
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