This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.
Microsoft had their biggest hardware announcement ever yesterday, with tons of new gadgets across their entire line. For the first time in a long time, Apple has serious competition in the high-end hardware space, and it’s awesome. Competition is a great thing that helps push companies to make better products for us, the consumer.
New Windows Phone Devices Turn Into PCs
They finally launched new flagship Windows Phone devices that any Microsoft fan could be proud of, although they don’t have a killer feature as a phone to make somebody switch from iPhone or Android, and they still don’t have decent app selection for Windows touch devices. It’s worth noting though, that a few important apps, like Slack, Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, are on their way.
What does make the Windows Phone line really interesting is that you can take your Lumia 950, plug it into a dock connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it will convert into a full Windows computer (you can only run Universal / Metro apps, but it’s still pretty great). This gives you a full-screen web browser, the touch versions of Microsoft Office, and whatever other apps you might need. For some people, this thing could be a computer replacement — after all, many people happily use a Chromebook and a smartphone as their only computing devices, and this combines it all into a single device.
We’ll have to see if Apple and Google adopt a similar feature in their mobile operating systems down the road, but considering how fast mobile devices are these days, it’s not far-fetched to think that in the somewhat near future, the only computer most people will carry is the one in their pocket, connecting to a bigger screen and input device when they are sitting at a desk. And it’s nice to see Microsoft pushing the industry forward.
The New Surface Book is the Tablet That is Actually a Laptop
The Surface Pro line never made sense to me — it works fine when you’re sitting at a desk, although the type cover keyboard isn’t great and the trackpad was just “functional”. If you are sitting at a desk with an external mouse it could definitely replace your desktop or laptop, but when you’re trying to use it in laptop mode, actually on your lap, it’s really just not comfortable.
And then using it in tablet mode isn’t a great experience because it’s too large to comfortably hold, and there’s a lack of decent touch-capable apps. I ended up using it on the couch with the pen like some sort of comically massive Palm Pilot.
That’s why the new Surface Book was, for me, the most interesting part of the announcement.
Microsoft made a more powerful Surface and created a true high-end, convertible laptop that you can actually use on your lap, or on a desk, or detach the screen entirely to use it as a tablet. When you are using it in laptop mode, it can use a much more powerful graphics processor that resides in the keyboard, and there’s extra battery to go along with it. And there’s an improved pen to help with writing notes in tablet mode.
The most important thing they added was a large glass touchpad that supports multi-touch gestures. The vast majority of Windows laptops out there have absolutely terrible trackpads that you can learn to use, but could never learn to love — which is really sad considering that MacBooks have had amazing trackpads for years now. It’s still not perfect — the laptop ends up being fairly bulky when closed and is a lot bigger than a comparable ultrabook or MacBook, but over time they will release new versions that get better, and other people will copy the form factor just like Apple and Google did with the Surface Pro form factor.
We’re finally at a point where an Apple fan can look at Microsoft’s Surface Book and get jealous of the hardware instead of the other way around.
Everything Else
For the new Surface Pro 4, they increased the specs from the SP3 and added a fingerprint reader into the keyboard, which is a nice addition, but somewhat boring. The Hololens development kit will ship next year priced at $3000 — we’re assuming the price is so high to make sure only serious developers get one, keeping the hobbyists out while they continue to refine the platform. The interesting Microsoft Band, which we reviewed a while back, gets a new update with a more comfortable design and better apps.
More reading: The 10 most important things from Microsoft’s Lumia event – The Verge
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