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Comment by dr_rezzy | Hacker News Reader

This makes me really excited about the future of the 'desktop' ( => tablet). Microsoft has really nailed it in terms of user experience and performance. This is a good example of out innovating the competition and no other company is better suited to execute on this than Microsoft.

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How do you know they nailed it in terms of performance? It's running on a Core i5, on which even Vista or Windows 7 runs well. We don't know how well it will run on Atom or ARM yet, which will be the "tablet optimized" chips, with higher battery life. The Core i5 will give 2 hours of battery life, especially in such a small package compared to a notebook.

They did show an ARM tablet as well. Besides by the time it is released, processors would have gotten even better.

Just see the keynote again. It actually uses less resources even today as compared to Windows 7 SP1.

What kind of battery life does Windows 7 SP1 get on tablets?

Don't know. A quick search brought up this page where the tablet gets a 7 for battery life. So I am guessing its ok.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/acer-iconia-tab-w500p/4505-3...

The $550 Acer Iconia W500 tablet (which comes with an attachable keyboard base) got 4:06 on a Cnet video playback battery drain test.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/acer-iconia-tab-w500p/4505-3...

Acer isn't exactly known for brilliant power engineering, so a better vendor could likely do better. But this also wasn't exactly a high-powered chip, either. So this is probably a plausible baseline for battery usage in Win 7.

They need to beat this by quite a bit in Win 8, or the tablets will be a tough sell.

Given that the iPad 2 gets 11 hours + in similar tests I don't think that's a tough sell, I think it's an impossible sell.

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