Are you ready for Surface Tablet?

Do you remember Netbooks? They came and gone. Today, I go to Best Buy or other stores, I see a few netbooks hiding in a corner somewhere. I never understood the use of a netbook.

Another electronics product I never understood was Apple's iPad and other Tablets.

As a developer, what can I do with an iPad? Watch movies. Browse the Internet. Access YouTube. Share Photos. Share this. Share that. What else? Access my emails? Well, all of the above sounds like a bored mom with 2 children, sitting at home with no job to do. Maybe a teenager? Maybe a sales rep or marketing professional to demo their products.

I am not sure. Yet, I have 2 iPads in my house among 2 of us. Wait! So let me explain. My son is 9 and for him I understand. He really uses his iPad with his games and Internet. Actually, that works well and now he leaves my iPhone alone. Another iPad I have is to test the apps I am building. So I have my reasons J Recently, I found another use of my iPad. My son has 2 hours of Football practice each day so I play some games, check my emails, and access the Internet.

But I still need a powerful laptop. I think everybody still needs a computer. The iPad is just an extra accessory similar to a phone that has its own limited use.

What about developers? Both netbooks and iPads are useless for developers.

We need juice! We do real work. We write pure code. We need power. We need energy. We need response. OK, if none of the above, we at least need Outlook and Office. If I have Outlook and Office on a Tablet, I could do some work like writing blogs.

That is where the Ultrabooks are relevant. Ultrabooks seem to be the perfect fit; slick, portable, powerful, and they have a Tablet look. There are some Ultrabooks that can also work as a Tablet. Here are some cool Ultrabooks and related stories:


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But there is one Tablet that may bring a lot to the table for developers; that is the Microsoft Surface Tablet. Yes, that's right. If I can run Windows 8 on a Microsoft Surface, use my outlook and run Office 2013 and even some Windows Store apps and can use a real keyboard. Now that sounds useful. The Surface Tablet can run Windows 8 with Intel/AMD processors and Windows RT ARM based processors. So, a Tablet running real Intel processor with Windows 8 can pretty much do what a Laptop can do. I know it may not be able to run Visual Studio 2012 and SQL Server but it can replace my extra laptop that I use for non-development purposes.

Check out details at: Microsoft Surface Tablet.

Microsoft is already building over 3 million Surface tablets. The Microsoft Surface is expected to be available sometime in the month of October.