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Comment by forgotAgain | Hacker News Reader

DOA. Buy an iPad and a good laptop for less money.

Your definition of a "good" laptop is different than mine. A sub $500 laptop isn't going to be competitive with this.

A sub $500 laptop is likely to easily outperform this on battery life, which is fast becoming the primary differentiator for me. My two-year-old Dell Netbook I bought for $300 can still go for 4 hours, and that's under heavy usage. Usually it's more like 5 or 6.

If I care about battery life, its because I'm on the move. If I'm on the move, I care about weight. And sub $500 laptops tend not to be ultrabooks.

I don't know about DOA, it does have wireless and more space than a Nomad.

How much is a 64Gig iPad?

Maybe he knows where you can buy a good laptop for $300.

A 64gig iPad 2, which is still far superior to this, can be had for $400 or so on the used market.

The real comparison, of course, is to a 32gig iPad, since that will have about the same amount of actual free space as this crapware-monster of a hulking beast of a pseudo-tablet has.

iPad without retina is no sale, and three versions behind. Or go iPad mini.

Which one of those has a real digitizer and comes with a pen to take meeting notes on?

While it isn't enough for me to want to use the Windows tablets, the lack of a proper pen/stylus tool for iPad really frustrates me. Having tried out writing on a Note/Note2 I'd really love to have an accurate writing tool for my iPad. I'd use it constantly.

Who cares for that? That’s the exact same niche market Microsoft served during the last decade and failed to reach any kind of mass-appeal.

Correction. It's the same "niche" Microsoft wrote _some_ software for, and had their OEMs deliver overpriced, crappy devices. Dell's tablet was around $2200, and had the specs of a $700 laptop.

And not to mention, outside of a few apps like OneNote, using Windows XP/Vista/7 in tablet mode is not a super pleasant experience.

I don’t see digitizers and styluses having any kind of mass-appeal. I cannot imagine any kind of plausible scenario for that. This is not a feature you can sell (except to a niche).

The Surface has to succeed or fail as a post-iPad tablet, not on tech specs no one cares about.

Drawing, and notetaking. Especially the latter. Having a digitizer and actual pen is far superior to capacitive devices for note-taking, since it more closely replicates actually taking notes.

If the battery doesn't last for a full day of meetings then the pen interface isn't a differentiator.

A note-taking device with under 4 hours of battery life is a joke.

Where is the four hours of battery life figure coming from? At least on windows 7, battery life is incredibly dependent on software configuration. Is four hours the default-settings movie-watching battery life or the power-conservation near-idle battery life? Note-taking should be closer to the latter.

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