News - Surface ‘Power Cover’ to be launched after Surface 2 this year

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Battery packing ‘Type Cover’ style accessory is not compatible with the original Surface RT.

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Read more.

So to make this thing usable you need to add a battery and a keyboard which makes it thicker and heavier. I have a feeling that I have seen this before. I think it's called a laptop!

No, the surface will be perfectly usable as a tablet (I've had a mess with a couple of Win 8 tablets and it's quite a nice experience), the cover will simply add both a keyboard for productivity and an extra battery slice - so you'll only need to take it with you when you're particularly worried about battery or typing a lot. There's plenty of other tablets with keyboard/battery docks out there - why the hate for Microsoft's implementation?

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Originally Posted by SuGaR847

So to make this thing usable you need to add a battery and a keyboard which makes it thicker and heavier. I have a feeling that I have seen this before. I think it's called a laptop!

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Think of it as a bit of a choice.

You might be going on holiday, you bring the type cover for the long flight out there. Allows you to have a good 12+ hours of battery life for the flight.

But once there you also want to be able to bring it out to a coffee shop as you need to get some work done, but you don't need anything more than the touch cover. So you just bring that.

I always liked this feature on my Transformer. Having a keyboard with battery allowed me to charge (and protect the screen) while the device was in my bag and also had the keyboard for if I actually needed to do something productive but when just using it for media or browsing I can have a tablet.

It raised my transformer battery from 9ish to 14ish hours and also while using the tablet I could charge the keyboard off in the corner of the room and when I packed up and shoved it into my bag it would recharge the tab ;)

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Originally Posted by SuGaR847

So to make this thing usable you need to add a battery and a keyboard which makes it thicker and heavier. I have a feeling that I have seen this before. I think it's called a laptop!

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It's detachable, it's different and makes a good tablet and really not a laptop. Problem I realised when I read all the reviews is the lack of "lap stability", I don't get a useful table on the trains I get, I need it to sit on my lap rigidly docked to the keyboard if I want to work and the Surface doesn't really work for that. I'm still waiting for my ideal lightweight dockable tablet/keyboard combo, hoping Silvermont will allow a design I find light enough AND powerful enough... (I don't have super high demands for the latter, my current laptop is an AMD Turion 1.3GHz).

Have to say I'm more of a sucker for sliding keyboards (just downgraded from an O2X to a Milestone 2 to get that lovely physical keyboard :D) so I've taken a bit of a shine to the Toshy Satellite 920U as a design - problem being exactly how strong that hinge will be in the long term (but that's the problem with all true convertibles). The HP TC1100 had a good combination of sturdy keyboard dock and detachable tablet, but of course that was a much fatter design than people would be happy with now, and I don't know if a similar hinge could be made on a tablet as thin as we have now.

But ultimately, if someone makes an 8" kabini windows tablet with sliding keyboard, I'll have found the replacement for my playbook when it finally gives up the ghost... ;)

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

why the hate for Microsoft's implementation?

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Because they earned it? ;-)

I'd be happy with a Surface Pro which was cheaper, slower, and more efficient simply so I could run basic Windows software on there (rather than RT faux-Windows apps, which defeat the whole point of a unified Windows experience). I definitely don't want a heavier, more expensive keyboard so I can run power-hungry software which has no real place on a tablet at the moment. To me this announcement just serves to emphasise a weakness rather than address the Pro's main issue... it's not the laptop it wants to be.

IMO anyway. I confess to being impatient where MS is concerned these days. They seem unable to make anything I want any more, which is frustrating because I'm definitely not an Apple person, despite buying an iPad, and I find Android quirky despite owning several phones now.

I want to believe this company knows what they're doing... they are, after all, worth a lot more than I am and have a collective neural network the size of a small planet! :-) But they make it so hard sometimes. Surely there are already no end of portable battery devices which could be used to charge via USB? I have a tiny box which doubles the life of my iPad and an even tinier one which doubles the life of my phone.

But no, that's too easy. :-)

So why not buy a Surface Pro and a 3rd party USB charging device? No-one's going to be forced to by a cover - touch, type, power or whatever - if that's not what they want to do with the tablet. And if you're not doing anything intensive with the tablet, a Haswell processor's very low idle power will give you oodles of battery life anyway.

MS want to promote a premium Windows product with flexible usage options, so they've gone for a high power tablet with a variety of optional extras. It's a sensible way to do it. Other people will release Atom and Kabini based tablets which are ultra low power, long battery, content consumption devices (Acer already have the 8" W3, after all), but that's not where MS want to be, which is fair enough IMO...