News - Japan gets 256GB Surface Pro with Office 2013 for free

[crossy]

What they need to do is offer devs the ability to have licenses across all platforms. As is on Andriod you'll end up buying the app two or three times. Once for the phone, again for the higher resolution phone and again for the tablet. Not very good for the user, and discourages brand loyalty too. Having the ability for a developer to share a license across apps would be a rather handy feature. Of course MS haven't done anything like that.

Whilst agreeing with some of what you're saying I'm going to pick you up on the "multiple licenses needed on Android" comment. There's only two occasions where I've found that to be the case:
1. Where there's separate "phone" and "tablet" editions of an app - in my case BeyondPod and SwiftKey;
2. Where an app appears to be locked to a particular device - and the only app I've come across that does that is CoPilot (it needs a separate "activation" step - which is a pain)

The rest of the time, as long as you use the same gmail.com account on phone and tablet then you can install on both. Same deal with Amazon's app store - in fact I had one or two apps installed on three devices - one phone and two tablets. Although I've now "rationalised" that.

Being able to "float" a license between iOS, Android and Windows - where an app WAS cross-platform - would be great though. E.g. if I defect to Windows Phone next year then I'm going to have to rebuy CoPilot, and it's not that cheap (comparatively).

[TheAnimus]

You miss-understand me.

It's when the vendor wants to release multiple versions, take Fruit Ninja for example. How many versions are there?!

[crossy]

You miss-understand me. It's when the vendor wants to release multiple versions, take Fruit Ninja for example. How many versions are there?!

Oh that - I thought you were meaning some technical obstacle rather than the avarice of the software houses. The one that really gets me though is Angry Birds - change the graphic resources, add new tunes and sell it to you again.

[Scribe]

They need a new Surface with Haswell to offer 'tablet-like' battery trends, however I'm sorely disappointed that they think that the UK customer wouldn't also expect 256GB given the huge overheads of a Windows install. Certainly a copy of Office wouldn't be a miss either, as it's supposed to highlight the productivity of touch.

[TooNice]

A lot of the phone apps aren't really wanted/needed on a larger tablet, having them either 'dumb scaled up' or 1:1 isn't really good either. I don't think I've ever used any on my iPad like that.

I haven't used a tablet extensively to comment on that, but even if the use is limited, I am taking the view that having the option is better than not having the option I guess. There are probably applications where it is neither better or worse, and you could at least distribute your battery usage that way. Yes without a tablet weighing you down you could grab a couple of battery boosters, but if you are going to have/use both, then it'll be an advantage.