In an interesting conversation at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference yesterday, Microsoft’s CFO Peter Klein indicated that a Surface Mini might be waiting in the offing. There’s no indication of what size the Surface Mini might be, but it’s fairly safe to assume that it would be a 7-inch tablet that goes head-to-head against the Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and iPad Mini.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs conference, Klein hammered home the fact that Microsoft — at long last — is capable of extending the Windows (Metro) experience to almost every form factor. “The notion of flexibility and scalability of the operating system is intrinsic to our strategy,” he says. On smaller devices, Microsoft has Windows Phone 8, and for everything else there’s Windows 8, Windows Server 8 and Windows Embedded 8. With the same kernel in both WP8 and Windows 8, and app cross-compatibility, it is in theory quite easy for Microsoft to create an almost-seamless ecosystem that spans the gamut from 4- to 40-inch displays.
The question on my mind, though, is which operating system would power the Surface Mini. At seven or eight inches, the Surface Mini would find itself in an uncomfortable chasm between Microsoft’s two OSes. You see, despite having the same kernel and roughly the same Metro interface, Windows 8 and WP8 are rather different beasts. WP8 is designed almost exclusively for portrait use, while Windows 8′s Metro Start screen is only really usable in landscape orientation. Neither OS deals very well with repeated reorientation, which is exactly what most users do with 7-inch tablets (from reading, to gaming, to checking email, to watching a movie).
No comments:
Post a Comment