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Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

I used a Windows Surface tablet a few days ago. It was clearly underpowered, but was far better than I expected. For the first time in years I thought, Microsoft may actually survive this mobile thing.

Windows has a massive selection of software. Their top priority should have been to make it as easy as possible for those legacy developers to add any level of metro support and integration to their existing applications.

Instead they chose to handicap themselves, as if they were producing a brand new operating system. Was the tradeoff of taking a cut of all software sales worth the effective action of starting with a software library the size of webOS's?

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"I used a Windows Surface tablet a few days ago. It was clearly underpowered, but was far better than I expected. For the first time in years I thought, Microsoft may actually survive this mobile thing."

Same. I thought the flat interface was slick. Gestures on the edges of the tablet were smart. Keyboard selections (soft and hard thicker keys) were a nice features. Only thing I didn't appreciate were some of the Windows salespeople trying to convince me my gripes were unjustified. I typed faster than the keys were registered and he said it was because my stance was tense and I needed to relax.

When you buy it, there's an instructional DVD that helps you practice the correct stance for your Windows Phone. You'll get the hang of it after 2 or 3 20-minute sessions, though it might take a while to master it completely.

Are there different stances for tanking, DPS, and PvP?

I am all about hoping for good MS hardware, and desperately want to find a Windows phone I like, but if you need a special stance for your tablet there's something wrong.

Is this serious? How does stance actually have an effect on keypress recognition speed?

A tablet that can read your stance will probably be the next big thing.

While the technology to detect stance would probably be interesting, I don't see the functionality as being good for general usage. Using your stance as some way of gestering the system seems really inconvenient. That said, there are probably a lot of niche uses for such hardware.

In other words, sounds like something that would be more useful to be hooked into via API be app developers, but doesn't sound like it would solve any general OS usage issues.

Good point. There was no chance I was being sarcastic. Good catch.

> I typed faster than the keys were registered and he said it was because my stance was tense and I needed to relax.

If this happened while you were typing in Word, they may not have installed the update that fixed this issue (was reported in the comments of a surface article on here somewhere).

I got to play with a co-workers Surface RT for a bit, and I experienced this in the browser. With URLs I am familiar with I can type them quite quickly, and it clearly lagged behind.

Some teething issues no doubt, and the store staff are being clueless salespersons, but it feels like it has promise.

I agree with you - it should be a priority of Microsoft to make it easy for legacy developers to migrate to Metro. But at the same time, they can't hamstring their products for the sake of complete backwards compatibility.

I believe that WinRT is actually a relatively easy migration path from .Net. The biggest change is needing to use asynchrony in certain cases. You can even still link to your old C++ dlls! You do need to strip out disallowed API calls (Winsock, for example), but you are allowed to link against offending dlls during development. They only need to be removed for certification.

They probably want Metro apps to be available on RT.

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