Microsoft announces newest version of Surface tablet

Microsoft has announced the newest version of the Surface tablet, to take on the Apple iPad.

The new Windows tablet had given a boost to Windows RT operating system (though now Windows RT 8.1), despite the lacklustre reception it has received over the last several months, but that did not mean nothing had changed.

The revamped tablet comes with a new look, new hardware, and a price low enough to tempt away a few Apple faithful.

The Surface 2 comes with Nvidia's Tegra 4 (T40) processor, a 1.7GHz ARM mobile quad-core CPU with 72 graphics cores and is coupled with 2GB of RAM.

The Apple iPad, is powered by Apple's custom designed A6X processor, which is also an ARM processor, but the dual-core processor has only four graphics cores.

However according to commentators, while one could end up reading too much into the raw specs of the processors, it was worth noting that the tablets had tailored the hardware and software to work together, and Windows RT was a different system from than Apple's iOS, therefore how the actual  performance and user experience would compare was not really known.

The storage capacities, however could do with some direct comparison and the new Surface 2 was available configured with either 32GB or 64GB of solid-state memory, while the 4th-generation Apple iPad, on the other hand, was available with storage of 16, 32, and 64GB.

The 32GB version of the Surface 2 is on offer for $449, $50 less than the original base price of the Surface RT, while the 64GB model sells for $549. The Apple iPad is priced £379.99 on Amazon.

According to ZD Net, complaints about Surface were mainly around Windows RT, and that the post-PC era was dependent on simplicity -- simple ideas that were accessible to everyone.

However with Windows RT Microsoft had managed to build the most confusing proposition that was possible to build, the report noted.

Windows RT was a version of Windows that looked like Windows, yet one could not install one's own Windows software on it, which was hardly helpful to anyone, it said, adding that RT needed to have been killed off and the right way of going forward with a lightweight OS was to bring the Windows Phone OS onto larger devices in exactly the same way that Apple did with iOS and Google did with Android.

Microsoft too seemed intent to do the same and there was no rationale behind delaying the inevitable and rolling out a new Windows RT-based device.