The Surface Pro: My next “tab-top”?

Ed Bott has a nicely done review from of the Surface Pro – lots of things which caught my attention – 2 lbs weight, stylus, 5+ hour battery life, DisplayPort connector, Touch cover.

I had considered waiting for it as my replacement for my travel Toshiba, which bless its heart, is really beat up with a missing D cap on the keyboard and worse. In the 4-5 months of waiting I have tried a Chromebook, a Win 8 Ultrabook, and iPhone 5/iPad 2 and a Surface RT for my travels.

And I have come to some fairly basic conclusions:

a) I am not an ideal candidate for touch screens due to my grubby fingers. I need a stylus, and ideally a physical keyboard. That’s a negative against extensive use of  iOS devices.

b) Airline and hotel wi-fi are still flaky so a mostly cloud centric device like the Chromebook can be frustrating

c) The Surface RT was too castrated and could not run many applications I need on the road

d) Win8 takes some getting used to as I wrote here and my Toshiba Ultrabook  is giving me that practice

So, I can see one of 3 scenarios a) The Surface Pro is reasonably successful over the next year, and between Microsoft and the user community plenty of kinks are worked out and I am more comfortable with Win8 Pro on my Ultrabook. b) New form/factors – what I term “tab-tops” like the Lenovo Yoga  - continue to emerge and mature c) The Surface Pro does not do too well commercially, and I can pick up the device and accessories at a significant discount in a few months.

My gym trainer talks about “muscle confusion” – different equipment and exercises every few minutes. I think we have entered the age of “brain confusion” – move from one device to another a few times a day.