Beneath the Surface
One of the biggest ways Microsoft reveals itself is through its blogs. In fact most minor product announcements are made this way nowadays.
Product groups go deeper, and generally have blogs that offer a step-by-step commentary on how a product is being built, what new features the company is willing to talk about and what the developers were thinking along the way.
The company also spends a good deal of time talking to blogs of others, and these conversations can serve the same purpose.
Panos Panay, general manager of Microsoft Surface, talked about his group's thinking on Surface.
One knock on Surface is its resolution of 1366 x 768 is far less than the iPad's 2048 x 1536. In fact, the Surface has far less resolution than the maximum resolution of most PCs. The reasoning is that Microsoft is focused instead on what is called the modulation transfer function (MTF) which combines resolution and contrast.
MTP, apparently part of ClearType, gets rid of the jaggies and make things clearer than the resolution would otherwise indicate. Sounds like is does much the same thing as anti-aliasing.
Other items tackled? The machines don't have Ethernet ports or support mobile wireless techs 3G and 4G. The company apparently sees WiFi and Bluetooth as the most useful wireless technologies.
Not having mobile wireless may irk some, but I refuse to pay extra for mobile data for a tablet. My cable, phone, Netflix and mortgage are more than enough monthly expenses.
Posted by Doug Barney on 10/22/2012 at 1:19 PM