By Vishal Mathur, Mint, New Delhi
After Apple and Google launched new hardware, including phones and tablets, to target the festive buying season, it is now Microsoft’s turn to do the same. The Redmond-based company has announced some updates to its Windows 10-based computing devices and smartphone line-ups. Here is a look at the new gadgets that Microsoft has announced.
Surface Book: their first convertible laptop
The screen can be pushed all the way back 360-degrees, and can also be detached from the keyboard dock.
The Surface Book is Microsoft’s first attempt at making a Windows-based convertible computing device, even though their software offerings have been focusing on these hybrid PCs for quite some time now. It has a 13.5-inch touchscreen, known as PixelSense, with a resolution of 3,000x2,000 pixels. The machine is powered by an Intel Skylake processor, a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GPU and a solid state drive. The screen can be pushed all the way back 360-degrees, and can also be detached from the keyboard dock. The Nvidia graphics card is in the dock, and the Surface Book switches to the Intel Skylake integrated graphics when used as a tablet. Microsoft claims 12-hour battery life, which will put it in the same category as the Apple MacBooks.
The Surface Book is priced at $1,499 and is now up for pre-order in the US, and it isn’t clear at present whether Microsoft will launch this in India.
Surface Pro 4: Better innards
The tablet also comes with the updated stylus, known as Surface Pen—tail-end eraser, 1,024 pressure points on the tip.
Microsoft has upgraded the Surface Pro line-up, with the new tablet getting a larger screen and the latest Intel Skylake processor. While the Surface Pro 3 has a 12-inch screen, the Surface Pro 4 gets a 12.3-inch—the resolution remains the same at 2,160×1,440 pixels. While a larger screen has been incorporated, the dimensions of the tablet remain the same as earlier.
The Surface Pro 4 integrates the Microsoft Hello biometric authentication with a new fingerprint sensor integrated into the keyboard dock, known as the Type Cover. The tablet also comes with the updated stylus, known as Surface Pen—tail-end eraser, 1,024 pressure points on the tip, and enhanced battery life.
The Surface Pro 4 will be available in the US later this month, at prices starting from $899. The previous editions of the Surface tablets never made it to India.
New Lumia phones: Another attempt
Microsoft is making another attempt at getting a larger chunk of the smartphone market share, and has announced the affordable Lumia 550, and the more powerful Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL.
The Lumia 550 has a 4.7-inch AMOLED 1280×720 screen, is LTE network capable and will run Windows 10 mobile operating system. It is powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon 210 paired with 1GB RAM, and 8GB of storage. With these specs, we can only hope that Windows 10 for smartphones is better optimized to use even less RAM, otherwise multi-tasking performance could be severely hit with just 1GB RAM. There is a 5-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front camera. The Lumia 550 will be available in red, white, blue, and black colour options, and retains largely the same design cues as the previous generation of affordable Lumia smartphones. It sports a price tag of $139. We do expect it to come to India sometime before the end of this calendar year.
The Lumia 950 and the Lumia 950 XL are the phones Microsoft hopes will compete against the high-end Android smartphones. The 950 has a 5.2-inch screen, while the 950 XL has a bigger 5.7-inch screen, but both have the same resolution of 2,560×1,440 pixels. There are a bunch of other similarities too—both are AMOLED screens, have 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage, USB Type C ports for charging, Qi wireless charging integrated, Qualcomm rapid charging support and the pairing of 5MP front cameras and 20MP rear cameras. The 950 runs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 processor, while the 950 XL runs the Snapdragon 810 processor.
The 950 and 950XL will cost $549 and $649, respectively. The India-specific pricing has still not been announced.
©2015 the Mint (New Delhi) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
