Windows 8 Update: Steve Ballmer’s 80-inch Windows 8 tablet
While it lacks the mobility usually associated with this class of device, there’s an 80-inch tablet serving the head of Microsoft as a wallboard and as a substitute for other work-related gear.
“Steve Ballmer has an 80-inch Windows 8 tablet in his office. He’s got rid of his phone, he’s got rid of his note paper. It’s touch-enabled and it’s hung on his wall,” the company’s vice president Frank Shaw told wired.co.uk. “It’s his whiteboard, his email machine … and it’s a device we’re going to sell.”
MORE: Windows RT management could be a key to success for Windows 8 tablets
While there’s not a huge consumer market yet for such enormous tablets, that could change over time as customers become familiar with these devices and their demands change, Shaw says. “It’s not a consumer thing now, but we know historically that that’s how all things start,” Shaw told wired.co.uk. “The idea that there should be a screen that’s not a computer, we’ll laugh at that in two years.”
A Sharp 80-inch touchscreen running Windows was demonstrated at CES earlier this year, but Ballmer’s jumbo tablet is something different, made by a different manufacturer, Shaw says.
This screen size goes well beyond the 27-inch “family hub” device described in a Building Windows 8 blog earlier this year that details how to scale the operating system to different screen sizes, but that was not a comprehensive list. “Windows will support just about any screen dimension so long as the graphics driver and hardware combination provide the correct information to Windows,” the blog says.
Office for iOS?
The rumor has popped up again, this time from mobile news site bgr.com, that Microsoft plans to release a complete Office suite for iPads and Android tablets. This rumor comes from “a reliable source,” the site says.
Contributing doubt to this rumor is that doing so would shoot Microsoft’s Windows RT efforts in the foot, something the company is certainly capable of and that in the big picture may be a good tradeoff.
Windows RT, as the ARM-based Windows 8 offering is known, is the closest thing Microsoft will have to an iPad, and like Apple does for the iPad, Microsoft is limiting what software customers can add to it. One of the features Windows RT comes with is a bundle of four out of seven Office applications. (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote included; Outlook, Publisher, Access left out.)
Originally posted here: Windows 8 Update: Steve Ballmer’s 80-inch Windows 8 tablet
