If you were shopping for a tablet around the holidays last year, chances are you’ve borne witness to the tablet battles of 2012 Q4. Apple had released the newest iPad (apparently too soon for some users who just got theirs a couple of quarters ago), Google unleashed the Nexus 10, Samsung released the second Galaxy Tab 10.1, Amazon had the Kindle Fire HD, and Microsoft introduced the Surface RT. With the tablet industry definitely on the rise, it was raining tablets for the consumers to grab last quarter.
Tablets, Tablets Everywhere
Everyone had an opinion on who had the best tablet and for whatever reasons. Some of the users who just wanted a tablet to stay connected online everywhere and browse the web comfortably opted for the “budget” tablets, while others who demanded performance—high-performance apps that could control an entire virtual office and create dazzling graphics—looked for the ones that cost more but performed as promised. There was a tablet that applied to everyone’s needs.
Unfortunately, the Surface RT as released by Microsoft seemed to have fallen short of already low expectations.
The Bad Reviews
The Surface RT couldn’t possibly be all that bad: it was very easy to start up and install and could instantly interconnect various online social networking accounts. However, the “bare bones” makeup of the RT (it didn’t have the full OS features of Windows 8) meant that most of it ran on online services and apps, and not really on its own. That isn’t so bad for many users who may have just wanted a way to stay connected online through the tablet or keep up with their social networking accounts.
But a tablet should at least run apps, and from various reviews online, there just wasn’t enough to keep the Surface RT afloat. Windows’ App store is difficult to stay connected to, and it goes up and goes down in an erratic fashion. Users have claimed trying to download the same app for days with no such luck since the connectivity to the App Store kept failing. The tablet would get sluggish from time to time in random glitches that some users got and some did not.
The Internet Cannot Save You
At this point, the fact that it can connect to the internet is just not enough. The ecosystem of the Windows Surface RT just isn’t conducive to doing much apart from being online. Other users still have to rely on their other devices in order to just run Apps. There was a laughably small amount of apps on the App Store that can run on the Windows ecosystem already (even less than Android, which already has less than Apple), and the fact that you can barely download any of them is a real downer.
If you want a tablet that could conceivably perform more sophisticated processes and actually run Windows 8 programs, an Ultrabook may be better suited to you. Otherwise, the Windows Surface RT, apart from being a 10-inch literal window to the web, might just end up being a fancy paperweight.
