Microsoft Surface available for pre order now

Microsoft has announced its pricing for its Surface tablets. 32GB comes at $500 & 64GB comes at $600 and if you want a black touch keyboard with it, add $100 more. The prices are very much comparable with top-level tablets in the market. What you get more is Standard USB socket & HD Video out, stylus, Office RT which comes bundled,

Most Critical Feature

What is critical for me is that the device is MULTI-USER. So my family can use it w/o messing up with my critical data. I find that as an issue when I hand over my iPad to my 5-year-old son. There are few games which allow in-app purchases as well and if things go wrong, you may end up paying for stuff you don’t want. Or the child may launch your mail application and accidentally delete your mails.

The keyboard is a nice & easy addition but I also type in Devnagari script a lot (Marathi & Hindi) for which I find on-screen keyboard very easy and intuitive. I am not sure if the Surface keyboard can display actual characters depending on the keyboard layout.

Model Comparison

Surface has two models to compare. Comparing the specs of RT and Pro versions and being a desktop user for so many years, Pro is definitely compelling as it has both desktop and touch mode. Also on hardware and screen resolution front, it is better. Continue reading “Microsoft Surface available for pre order now”

Big Data will make many sci-fi stories come true

I was reading few links shared by my colleague on the upcoming book “Human Face of Big Data”. While reading these articles I started realizing that where this is heading. Today there are systems which are getting build to analyze human behavior of all sorts. The primary driving factor today is social networking and leveraging this for advertisements and generating funds. However systems are coming in healthcare that analyze basic human behavior to understand warnings of illness, health risks like heart attack or its recurrence. As the technologies are getting built what the computers are learning is how to process unstructured data.

Today a human brain is much better and faster in many ways is because it processes unstructured data of all kinds. Even when you are on a foreign land, you start collecting information and process it. It takes some time to settle down however, the basic programming of the brain is not required to be changed. As we are now developing techniques to get meaningful information out of Big Data, the next obvious step would be to write a generic logic that can process any sort of data and furthermore, get audio, visual, textual, geo-spatial data and process all together by linking all of them in real time.
Continue reading “Big Data will make many sci-fi stories come true”

Microsoft Surface vs. iPad

On June 18th 2012 Microsoft launched is first ever full computing hardware Microsoft Surface. It was morning time in India when I started reading the liveblog updates of the event on the Verge site and by the time I started for office, the event was over and I had enough details to shout in the bus to my colleagues about this new WOW product. Few of them who were half asleep felt like “Ummm … OK! so Microsoft is launching an iPad competitor. Big deal. They can’t compete with Apple.” I use an iPad and I bought the iPad 2 about 1.5 years back after seeing the tablets running Windows 7. When I saw those tablets, the experience was so jerky compared to iPad, I thought I will never see a great tablet from Microsoft OEMs. I even though I had few objections to what is available on iPad, I went ahead and bought it.

Continue reading “Microsoft Surface vs. iPad”