Microsoft fills in some details on Surface RT during Reddit IAmA

Although we know a lot about the Surface RT from Microsoft, there are still gaps in the finer details that you may want to know—either just for curiosity or because it factors into your decision on whether to buy one.

Luckily for you the Surface team to a Q&A session on Reddit yesterday and they answered quite a few question about the upcoming tablet. To help you sort through, we’ll summarize some of the main points…

  • Surface supports Xbox 360 USB controllers for gaming
  • USB will recognize almost all devices, including cameras and will charge your phone
  • No NFC due to the Mag case interfering with the antenna
  • 32GB device will have 20GB available for storage for apps/games; SD card is for movies, pictures and music
  • SDXC is supported; cards can be swapped on the fly
  • Touch Cover has a Microsoft invented smart digitizer, can infer if you meant to press the key or not
  • TouchCover/TypeCover detect orientation relative to the Surface, so it will disable the KB when closed or flipped back
  • Why no 3G/4G mobile broadband? Microsoft looked at tablet sales data: 2/3 WiFi, 1/3 Mobile Broadband. Of the 1/3 sold, only1/2 were ever activated.
  • On the display not being super high resolution, Microsoft addresses this through a three pronged method: ClearType for pixel smoothing, Custom designed 10.6” high contrast wide angle screen and optically bonded the screen with the thinnest optical stack anywhere on the market. In turn, the reflectiveness of the Surface’s display is much lower than the iPad, resulting in higher contrast of colors and more visible detail
  • Why no USB 3.0? Microsoft chose USB 2.0 instead of 3.0 based on capability of the ARM SoCs during their development timeframe.

Source: Reddit

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.