Don't Buy a Microsoft Surface, Buy This Instead

The Microsoft Surface is dead. Asus just killed it.

The most exciting tablet I've seen all year runs real Windows. I've been using the Asus Transformer Book T100 at home for a few days. Unlike with an iPad, I can actually do my work on it. 

I'm not just talking about having Microsoft Office rather than the weird maroon that is iWork. I'm talking about calling up full desktop websites in Chrome, complete with add-ons and plugins. I'm talking about downloading a picture from a website into a real filesystem, annotating it in real Photoshop (not the crippled Photoshop Express), popping open two different Evernote windows and putting it all together in our content management system. All on a $349, convertible laptop-tablet.

The hero here is Intel's new Bay Trail processor, the first x86 chip to offer the right balance of cost, speed, and power consumption for effective low-cost tablet computing. The T100 - with the keyboard! - is $100 less expensive than Microsoft's crippled Surface 2, $150 less than an iPad Air, and $550 less than Microsoft's Surface Pro 2.

More Bay Trail tablets are coming soon, too. They're going to make for real competition to the iPad, in ways the limited Surface and expensive Surface Pro were never able to provide. I never saw the point of Intel processors in Android devices, but combined with real Windows, they're killer.

This is not a review of the Asus T100 tablet. For benchmarks and lab-based analysis, check out Eric Grevstad's excellent review of the tablet from our sister site, Computer Shopper.

The End of Windows RT
The strength of Windows is its ubiquity. You know what runs on Windows; almost everything runs on Windows. When you pick up a Windows PC, you buy into the broadest software ecosystem ever created.

Had Windows RT been sold as a genuinely different operating system, like Apple has sold the Mac and iOS, it might have had a chance. But Microsoft called it Windows 8, made it look exactly like Windows 8, and tried to promote that it ran Windows 8 apps, except for a small set of useless old apps derided as "legacy."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, what the company calls "legacy" apps, most of us call "Windows" apps. That category includes pretty much all of the heavy-hitters for the platform, including many apps and games that are being developed today. The result was a confusing set of "Windows" tablets that didn't do Windows, at least as most of the universe understands it.

With Bay Trail, there is no reason to ever build a Windows RT tablet again. Intel has proven that it can get decent performance at an acceptable price with full Windows compatibility.

That doesn't mean abandoning touch. For many uses, touch is the future. But the split between Photoshop Express and full-blown Photoshop shows why you may want to have both the touch and full desktop options available. Touch is for lightly skimming over the surface of the world by your fingertips: a multi-window desktop interface is for digging in.

With the T100 I found that my workflow was some of this, some of that. In the evening, I'd kick back into the touch version of IE, into the touch version of Kindle, or into the Mail program to read and answer messages. In the morning, I'd open three desktop Chrome tabs in parallel with Evernote and Excel windows and wale on the hardware keyboard.

Can't do that on an iPad.

And Then There Were Three
With the coming of the Bay Trail tablets, we now have three valid tablet operating systems. The iPad is still going to be the best choice for many consumers. With Windows 8, you pay a price for power in complexity. The iPad is simple, clean and clear, malware-free, with a unified interface and marvelous apps that spread the Internet before you. Underestimate it at your peril.

Windows 8 now becomes the choice for business: a complete, flexible platform for people who need to get the job done. When you get home, you can flip it into touch mode and hand it to your kids, or use the touch Web browser to look up the names of actors on TV. Because of its more complex user interface, I see this OS as tilting more towards the work side of the work/fun equation.

That leaves Android as the wild card. Android's best bet may be in the low-cost market. Because it's free, Android can provide a lot more value on products like the $229 Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HDX than iOS or Windows could. A huge amount of Android's growth, analysts are now saying, is in sub-$100 tablets that are largely used as e-readers, video players or casual gaming devices, often not even connected to the Web.

Android's challenge now is to prove it has value at the high end; once someone slaps a Wacom pressure-sensitive layer onto a Bay Trail tablet running a real copy of Photoshop, the Samsung Galaxy Note will become a much less appealing product.

The game is now on. Microsoft needed Intel to make it real. Bay Trail finally let them do it. And if you're looking for an inexpensive way to get some work done before you have your touchscreen fun, look straight at the Asus T100.