“When Microsoft launches the Windows 8 Pro version of its Surface tablet, the device will apparently have a battery life somewhere in the area of four and a half to five hours,” Electronista reports. “This according to a Panos Panay, head of Microsoft’s Surface project. Surface with Windows 8 Pro — which runs the full version of Windows 8 — will launch in January of next year.”
Electronista reports, “The announcement came today in a tweet from Panay’s own account. Panay didn’t go into detail, but he did say the forthcoming Surface Pro will have ‘approximately half the battery life of Surface RT.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s latest 4th generation iPad with Retina display delivers up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi‑Fi, watching video, or listening to music and up to 9 hours of surfing the web using cellular data network. Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air delivers up to 7 hours battery life.
Related articles:
Microsoft’s Surface Pro iPad killer to start at $899 – November 29, 2012
Microsoft’s Surface tablet flops, orders reportedly cut in half – November 29, 2012
TechCrunch’s Siegler reviews Microsoft Surface RT: ‘It’s time for a drop test – right into the garbage can’ – November 19, 2012
Slate reviews Microsoft’s Surface tablet: Too slow, mercilessly buggy; why is it so bad? – November 6, 2012
InfoWorld reviews Microsoft Surface RT: A disappointment; you’re better off with Apple’s iPad – October 31, 2012
Gizmodo reviews Microsoft Surface RT: Do not buy; inferior to Apple’s iPad; the worst of both worlds – October 25, 2012
The Verge reviews Microsoft Surface RT tablet: ‘The whole thing is honestly perplexing; who is this for?’ – October 24, 2012
ZDNet’s Kingsley-Hughes: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is an awful, horrible, painful design disaster – June 8, 2012
Analyst meets with big computer maker, finds ‘general lack of enthusiasm’ for Windows 8 – June 8, 2012
Dvorak: Windows 8 an unmitigated disaster; unusable and annoying; it makes your teeth itch – June 3, 2012
The Guardian: Microsoft’s Windows 8 is confusing as hell; an appalling user experience – March 5, 2012
More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video) – June 1, 2011
If there was ever any doubt this seals the deal – DOA!
Battery life is one of the #1 things that makes tablets great – all day without charging.
On 2nd thought…there never was any doubt…
Boomer Sooner.
This could be solved using multiple Surface devices. When the first one is sucked dry, pick up your second device and recharge the first. Or, while it is rebooting from a Blue Death Screen crash, swap out a removable battery. Be innovative Monkey Boy!
Atom cpu by Intel.
Is that a non sequitur or are you trying to be funny?
Atom? In a WhateverPad? You’re trying to be funny, aren’t you.
I think half the battery life is way too optimistic. In reality it will be 2 to 3 hours. There is a reason that Apple did not use Intel chips for tablets, and very special ones for MacBooks. A tablet with i5 series is stupid from the very beginning, the same with a tablet using a desktop OS.
If Microsoft was smart, they would have added a hidden extra battery in the snap-on (“optional”) keyboard cover that supplements the built-in battery, which is obviously insufficient for full Windows on Intel.
That’s less than some laptops!
What’s the point of making Surface?
No one knows.
To be proud of themselves. haha
But … but … the CLICK!
Remember, it CLICKS!
They need a snap on battery. More CLICKS!
Logically or functionally, there is no point, as several reviewers have complained. But in the larger picture of the PC wars, Microsoft has finally summoned the resolve to prepare a bold counterstrike.
The Surface is a strategic feint on the tablet flank, a delaying action as its OEM partners ready their regiments for a frontal assault on iPad. There has been some grumbling from these Hessians, however, and the massing of forces is tentative at best.
Even though these products don’t spec out in the war room, it’s understood that they can at least buy time for further armament development, and inspire the troops shivering in the rain clutching their rusted bolt-action rifles. A nervous public will be soothed with heart-warming market share stories, stimulated by stirring clarion calls, and diverted by elaborate dance routines.
To have waited any longer would have surrendered the territory through criminally aloof inaction, just as happened with the decimation of the Windows Phone entrenchment by the Apple/Android axis. Microsoft lost that campaign by dismissing the initial uprising as inconsequential, realizing too late that the rabble were crack shots.
History suggests this IS their best shot. My money is on the HP solution: fire the CEO, discount surface to $99 and close the division. I give Ballmer 90 days. …though the MS board do seem to like Ballmer. In fact they seem to like him very much. Weird huh?
Yes, they like him, they like him a lot!
I like him a lot too!
“As long as it takes!”
You keep using this word ‘decimation’. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Inigo.
When I draw a military analogy I use decimation in the sense of drastic reduction, not a precise ten per cent meted out as punishment. In the future, however, I shall substitute a more expressive word: stomped, eviscerated, obliterated all sound good when applied to Microsoft.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that is all.”
When I post a word on the Internet, I intend it to be completely free from association with any Internet meme, unless I deliberately intend such an association, in which case I slather it on like SPF 80 at the beach on July 4.
I think you used the word decimate correctly. It is equivalent in most minds to the word annihilate although its origins lies in the Roman practice of decimation by the culling of I in 10 in the ranks of the legions by the drawing of lots. But with the effluxion of time the commonly accepted usage of the word changed to what it is today – to thin the ranks of or to annihilate in a severe manner.
Thank you BLN, you are quite the gentleman. I am impressed with this pretty word effluxion; Isaac Newton perhaps knew of it.
‘Most minds’ think naming yourself after an idiot’s testicle is asinine.
Yet here you are lecturing about your latest Google word search as if anyone cares.
Dope.
hjs: Don’t forget defenestration!
😆
I think I would be fine having the RT surface. All I need windows for is office, and RT has the latest version of office Pre installed. To me, it would be worth the purchase just do delete the windows partition on my Mac hard drives.
And you’d pay nearly $1000 to do that? Seriously?
Buy a Macbook Air and run parallels if you must. It will run faster, be less buggy, and cost less than a tablet trying to be a notebook…
Go forth and multiply.
But.. but.. it runs Office! Therefore the enterprise has to buy millions of them, right? RIGHT?!
Biggest trainwreck in history, but why?
It needs a table anyway, you might as well keep it plugged in.
to work all those desktop apps (even M.S Office isn’t specially made for touch) you need a keyboard and a desk … so just PLUG the SUCKER IN!
and if you REALLY need to move around all you need is get a gotdam LONG EXTENSION CORD.
I’m sure all Microsoft Stores will be carrying garden hose length extension cords soon in reels, spindles etc SOON! (this will drive sales to half dead Ms stores!)
this battery thing is NO PROBLEM AT ALL!!!
when you WALK AROUND with an extenstion cord HANGING FROM YOUR WAIST, dam, you’ll look cool and everyone will KNOW you are a hip Microsoft User! (if apple could do it with white ear buds, why can’t MSFT do it with extension cords? Huh?)
Ballmer Rocks!!!
I envision a backpack reel, one hundred feet of shiny extension cord for interdepartmental meetings.
Love it! That’s classic Microsoft for you.
Nah no long cords. They’ll also sell BAT, big ass tables, that have induction type circuitry built-in, allowing for wireless charging. You drop your Surface Pro on your Surface BAT, and it charges.
Great!
Don’t stop there. Attract the green crowd with a miniature solar panel that sets up alongside the Surface. On cloudy days, it could double as a windmill, and indoors you could set your latte on it.
Ballmer: “Hear that click when you set your latte on it?”
It costs twice as much and only half as good a tablet as an iPad, but the good news it lasts only half as long!
No Problem here now that What’s the Problem??? has posted the solution. Yeh, can’t wait to get one of those “garden-hose-length” extension cords! Sure beats dropping bread crumbs so my boss can find me when I’m not at my desk!
Bread crumbs, LOL. Some of us scheme to set up a lifelike dummy at the desk as we furtively pursue small corporate indiscretions.
All of the death-of-Microsoft brouhaha will soon fade when the great anti-Apple savior, RIM, makes its triumphant comeback in January. Or June. Or 2014. Or, well, whenever it’s new gizmo actually hits the shelves to great praise and hurrahs. I think the anal-ists should give it another upgrade just because of the Microsoft FAIL. Poor Ballmer. I’ll bet he’s already submitted his CV to RIM for a leadership position.
No compromises!
People will eventually find that the Surface Pro is just a laptop with the guts reversed. Instead of the guts under the keyboard, they’ve been put behind the screen, This is Microsoft, of course their laptop is backassward.
Based on data from the wild, I think Surface should no longer be qualified as a tablet. It’s a laptop, crappy laptop at best. My 1st gen iPad’s battery life is better than Surface Pro.
Great comment thread. Must be Friday, eh? I propose a new category for this thing – the Floptop. Oh, goodie, it’s almost beer o’clock!
From the specs, it is quite clearly an Ultrabook. An ultrabook without a keyboard.
And here I was wondering why MS stock was so cheap.
That’s what you get with a combination of “Intel inside” and “Powered by Windows.”
It’s just an expensive netbook with the keyboard half missing, that then requires an “optional” floppy keyboard to make it fully functional. What a great design…!
When you figure half the battery life and you can only do half as much, it really works out to 1/4 the battery life with respect to what you got done ….
Does that make sense?
It makes sense, if you are generous enough to say that Surface can actually do even “half as much” as an iPad… 🙂
Microsoft’s Surface is still a truck. Everybody knows that a truck is a power hog. Except Balmer at Microsoft is living in denial.
This week I facilitated a training workshop using my unplugged iPad and Keynote from 8:30 until 4pm and I STILL had 20% power remaining.
It. Was. Awesome!!
It’s a pity it will come with battery at all.
This thing should not even have an ON switch!
Oh STOP Microsoft! STOP!
My *SMIRK* muscles are DYING here!
What is it with these MS dummies?!
Worst battery life than my iPhone 5 and it ugly as Hell. DOA!
The surface pro should get about 4.5 hours. Given that this is an actual computer in tablet form with “real work” capable hardware, squarely aimed to fill the gap other tablets leave; doing real work, getting 4 hours or more battery life is good.
Anyone with a little common sense would know the iPad;or any other low powered tablet, can not be compared to the Surface Pro. They are two different machines.
Stick to comparing the Surface RT to the iPad.