[Windows 8 General] SixSixSevenSeven:
Did I say university anywhere? I'm not there until september. And besides, wireless printing does not mean an iPad will print to it, has to support some stupid apple protocol which although many do, most don't. And besides, in my old school the printing was not inherently wireless. The entire school was covered with a local network (a very large network which is also a rather convenient example of mixed topology within a network for computer science lessons), all printers were normal network printers. If you found a wireless access point then any windows device had no problem printing, if you had an ethernet connection then you could print fine from any normal computer too, a few of the printers in the school were even recognised by some android devices (although that was hit and miss), windows RT was able to print to them fine, iPads insisted that there was no printer present, even for the wireless one over in A11. There were only 2 iPad compatible printers in the building, 1 in the head masters office and one in my computer science room which my tutor bought himself.

The only office suites for iPads (pages is probably best and I presume the one you mean) are all far inferior to MS Office in terms of available functionality. Credit where credit is due, pages does work rather nicely as a basic office suite but leaves alot to be desired for things like .DOC support etc. Openoffice was able to open my 130 page coursework fine, MS Office was fine, Pages loaded a few pages, then gave up. The demo surface RT in john lewis, loaded it into MS office fine, no lag, nothing broken. Then on top of that, all RT tablets have office pre installed already, iPad its a seperate purchase. Same for windows 8 admittedly, but at least on windows 8 there are incredibly good free alternatives which are all fully fledged yet run fine on the atom processors of the CHEAPER tablets.

USB mass storage even on jailbroken iPads is buggy, its a native feature in Windows (for storage one can assume RT and 8 to be the same thing, as they do use the same feature set on this front). Windows supports more file systems, try using an NTFS drive on your iPad, or even on OSX for that matter, OSX has read only support, iPad apparently is hit and miss for that. You have to jailbreak which most users appear incompetent enough to not be able to do. Windows you get support for various forms of network storage too. Windows 8 you get FTP etc, with jailbreaks that is available on RT although not everyone wants to jailbreak (although those that need FTP are probably capable of jailbreaking). You get a normal file system presented on desktop, with apps in Start too, a proper file system, excellent, even android has that.

You will find that most establishments (including medical and educational, I know people from both backgrounds) who are migrating to iPads from existing windows solutions already have software for windows devices. Well, newsflash, a full windows 8 tablet will run these systems no porting required. But this is a hugely irrelevant point as we are not discussing the medical profession. In most cases these businesses are having to write their new shiny iPad apps from scratch, well if they are writing new software anyway they can just as easily write it for android or windows Start, so that further nullifies your point.

And no, a Asus vivotab smart costs less than an iPad. And does what needs to be done. Photoshop, devil may cry and call of duty were not on the criteria list, he said note taking and that he specifically is not gaming. Another newsflash, photoshop actually runs on the atom surprisingly well, sure your not going to be editing 500 megapixel images and applying 42 filters to it and having them done in 1 second, but quickly touching up the contrast on a 5mp phone photo is well within its abilities, more than that is but thats another null point as thats not a criteria so it doesnt matter.

I understand you want to defend your over-priced purchase but if your going to slate a windows tablet, use actual or relevant facts.