I suspect you may see more of these through the end of the year as folks who had big plans for Android tablets realize that the non-iPad market is about to be "owned" by Windows 8. While i have my issues with Win 8 the idea of a tablet where I can use real programs, and not just apps, for the same price as an Android tablet makes my next purchase a no-brainer (insert/insult joke here).
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Except aren't most of these hypothetical tablets running on ARM so the actual software on the market now that will run on them is 0. Some stuff will get recompiled in ARM for them, but far from all of windows software out now. So we'll see.
And real apps aren't designed for tablet. So we'll see how much fun running desktop designed apps on a tablet really is.
I'm sceptical.
it's not just that you have to recompile for ARM; that would be too easy.
Third-party apps on Win8 ARM are Metro-only (or whatever Microsoft is calling Metro now). So okay, port to Metro, you think! Well, you can't use the Win32 API at all in Metro apps. It's simply not available. Instead, you have to use the Win32 replacement, WinRT, which is a somewhat-crippled version of Win32 (want to load a dynamic library at runtime? too bad! static libraries or bust!) which is very different from Win32 in terms of API design.
I can't see Win8 being a serious contender in the tablet space anytime soon. I get the impression that Metro and ARM are being used as an excuse to push WinRT because various groups at Microsoft don't like Win32, but the sudden total lack of applications or backwards compatibility is going to hurt them a lot.
iOS does not appear to have suffered from its lack of dynamic library support. It's funny people bring this up, because iOS Cocoa is crippled in exactly the same way.
But in this case the issue is that it is one of many things that makes it harder to port existing software, and so the shared lineage with Windows matters a lot less.
There are reasons for the Win RT API. Security (and the lock in) and responsiveness are two that I can think of. It's not just because "groups at Microsoft don't like Win32".
“While i have my issues with Win 8 the idea of a tablet where I can use real programs, and not just apps, for the same price as an Android tablet makes my next purchase a no-brainer (insert/insult joke here).”
According to Microsoft, its Intel tablets (the only ones capable of running regular Windows programs) are going to cost the same as ultrabooks [1]
I also have doubts about the usability of running regular Windows programs on a tablet. They're optimized for mouse+keyboard, not small touchscreens.
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228292/FAQ_What_we_d...
That's why you'll have the keyboard smart cover, and possibly USB :P
I think no-one expects you to use visual studio/word/whatever in touch mode, unless you're in a really tight bind.