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| Microsoft fresh out of pre-orders for Surface |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by lucas_maximus on 2012-10-18 11:58:12 |
| "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. |
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| RE[10]: Comment by Radio |
| By WereCatf on 2012-10-19 21:22:00 |
|
> 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) 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. |
 - Score: 3 |
| Comment by graig |
| By graig on 2012-10-20 01:05:21 |
| i want a lumia 920.... |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Comment by Radio |
| By pos3 on 2012-10-20 05:10:22 |
| 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 |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[4]: All 3 device sold... |
| By pos3 on 2012-10-20 05:12:16 |
| Your history of comment suggest otherwise :) |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[6]: Comment by Radio |
| By Soulbender on 2012-10-21 07:03:31 |
|
> Speaking of clusterfuck. How anyone puts up with the absolute BULLSHIT that is an Android tablet is BEYOND me. Wow, you have tested ALL of them to come to this conclusion. Absolutely awesome, thanks for your hard work. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[10]: Comment by Radio |
| By Neolander on 2012-10-21 11:26:32 |
|
> 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. 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... > 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. ...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 :) > 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) 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. > "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." Well my tablet had a Tegra 2 I believe. IIRC that had multiple cores. 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. > 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. 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. > 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. Indeed, there will probably be quite a few comparative reviews around once WP8 is officially out. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[5]: All 3 device sold... |
| By lucas_maximus on 2012-10-21 17:15:30 |
| I play devil's advocate a lot of the time and actually correct some of the ridiculous things which are usually said. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Maybe not this time. |
| By zima on 2012-10-25 23:46:07 |
| 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. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Maybe not this time. |
| By zima on 2012-10-25 23:58:29 |
|
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. |
| - Score: 2 |
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