[Galaxy Note 10.1 General] BarryH_GEG:
Three things are missing from this conversation to make it worthwhile.

1) Everyone uses their tablets differently. A gamer, heavy productivity user, graphic artist, reader, and someone who uses it primarily for consumption all have different needs. And someone's personal weighting of those things determine which product is "best" for them. I could easily see someone needing OneNote (and MS Office in general) jumping on W8 just for that. Same thing for a graphic artist who wants access to desktop versions of tools they typically use. How many of them there are and how well W8 tablets do more pedestrian things will determine their success, not our discussion.

2) We're comparing something that doesn't exist to something that does. Unless you all intend to go out and buy an Acer W500 with 4 hours of battery life and that weighs two pounds this is at best a theoretical conversation until actual W8 tablets are in people's hands and can be evaluated in real-world use. And don't forget the Pro tablets come with all the stuff we love about Windows: 1) driver incompatibilities, 2) control panel, and 3) multiple menus, clicks, and "enters," to launch or access something. The UI formally known as Metro doesn't hide the fact that there's a huge resource intensive hulk of an OS to be tamed running in the background. How many general-use iPad candidates do you think will find that acceptable? And they’re MS’s bogie, not the 20% of the tablet market that’s using Android.

3) Until the complete feature set is known for both RT and Pro tablets and what apps will be available to them initially you can't have a price-value conversation. I highly doubt entry-level consumer targeted RT tablets will do some of things being discussed. Similarly if a loaded Pro tablet is $1K that changes the conversation when comparing it to a $500 Android tablet.

I'll check back in with you guys once the tablets are in people's hands for a while and then we can have a legitimate conversation of the pros and cons of each.

BTW, here's an excerpt of a review of the HP TouchPad when it was first released. Just because a monolithic company launches something its success isn't guaranteed. It’s too early to say whether W8 tablets will be a Zune or an XBox 360 for MS and no one here can do anything but proffer an opinion as to which way it will go.

"You would almost think that webOS had been designed for tablets from the very beginning. It feels more native to tablets than any other software on any other tablet, despite being an almost exact translation of the phone interface (minus almost all of the bezel gestures). Multitasking on anything else feels almost stupid compared to Cards. An open app is a card. You can stack them, sort them, re-arrange them, and when you're done, close them. Juggling a bunch makes you feel like you're getting stuff done. Palm's big tablet adaptation, panes, is a straight riff on the iPad Twitter UI. So in email and other complex apps, you slide layers—inboxes, message lists, actual messages—back and forth to move between them. Notifications, which pop down from the top of the scree, let you flip through the pile, one at a time, without ever opening the app-handy if you get IMs from five different people. They're great ideas."
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