Lumia 2520: Our Vulture gets his claws on Nokia's first Windows RT slab Nokia's first Windows RT tablet – the 10.1in 2520 – was unveiled today, showing how wise the company was to bide its time. The Finnish firm has watched while first-generation Surface RT tablets and convertible laptop-slabs crashed and burned, and today's offering shows what it learned. The Lumia 2520 stands out on both price …
I largely agree with you, but you're a bit out with your volume agreements. My previous employer had an OVS agreement and had 250 employees. And believe me, an OVS agreement is useful when it comes to rolling out new versions of Office etc. without having to purchase, install and activate hundreds of individual copies!
Other than that, I agree. And the problem (largely) IMO is the cost of the OS. When you're making and selling a device for a few hundred pounds, the difference between a free OS (Android) and a £100 OS is quite sizeable.
This looks like a seriously interesting tablet for office workers & for personal users that use office.
I must say as an anti RT guy I'm about to give it a chance even if I do regret it's not a 3770 Baytrail full windows tablet.
I might consider it in addition to a standard notebook instead of a super expensive ultrabook.
Try using RT with an open mind? It's NOT full windows, but I use it EVERY day and it does EVERYTHING that I need it to. I don't need a CAD / Photoshop on it. It's like buying a CD player and complaining it can't play vinyl LPs - RT does the job for me. Considering MOST people use laptops / tablets for email, web surfing and a bit of word-processing - this DOES all of that and will allow you to PRINT using a USB port or wirelessly and INCLUDES a version of MS Office. If that doesn't do what you need, get something that does what you want.
I can never understand why people find the need to HATE things that don't affect them.
Its good to see peoples attitudes softening slightly... I had written off RT as useless until I got one for next to nothing and its great... it doesn't replace my laptop, but for the majority of things I do it does a more than adequate job...
And when people see real word and find out that you can open and print office documents without any messing about they are very surprised, to the point where I had one person question the purchase of iPad for staff.
Classic desktop is the easiest way to organise and shuffle files about, move them To a network share or USB drive, and all natively...
"I had written off RT as useless until I got one for next to nothing and its great"
Good for you. But you rather make the point for us. It might well be great, but not at the price Nokia is pitching it. If they want to sell consumer devices, they need to be in the £150 - £300 market segment, not starting at £400. The grandparent commenter might be perfectly correct - RT might well do all those things brilliantly - but a £100 no-brand Android tablet does them at least as well for the average user. Printing is the only thing that's been mentioned that RT does particularly better than Android, and even then most printer suppliers have an app for printing direct from an Android phone or tablet. So what makes RT at least £300 better?
Welcome to the Register. You will never find a place so full of narrow minded folk anywhere else, except for the Daily Mail. The key difference is that while the Daily Fail readers are all generally of the same mind, here you're guarantied to upset someone, be they a Microsofty, Fandroid, Mactard or something else.
RT is a reasonable, if flawed, concept for MS. They would have been better off scaling WinPhone up rather than Windows 8 down. Both of these products might have gained more from it. As an iPad owner already, I'm not in the market, but I'd have considered it, in the same way as I looked at phones recently and bought Nokia.
Some people do look beyond prejudices and pick what suits their needs.
Respectfully I think you're wrong here.
As I've replied previously and so have others - if you've got either Office 365 or Volume License then you can use RT & Office for business fine. There are a seriously large number of Office 365 users around & this is attractive who want light-weight, long battery and simple productivity that's compatible with everything in their organisation.
So in fact a business machine that can be and is being used for business. It will take time but all a bit over the top to get excited about how this is a failure already.
If I hadn't already bought a Lenovo Yoga 11 (at half-price), I'd probably buy one off-plan.
Putting an extra battery in the cover is a neat idea for business travellers who are used to swapping battery on long trips, and flipping the mouse-pad over the back should make it very resilient to being dropped.
While the Office licence is home/student, in practice that doesn't mean you can't do work on it, just that you must also have a regular PC licence.
Having RDP and Remote-FX makes it a neat terminal for full-fat Windows.. which is why Windows-RT is hear to stay
"However, organizations who purchase commercial use rights or have a commercial license to Office 2013 suites that include Outlook can use Office 2013 RT for commercial, nonprofit, or revenue-generating activities."
Tom - you left out the rest :
"However, organizations who purchase commercial use rights or have a commercial license to Office 2013 suites that include Outlook can use Office 2013 RT for commercial, nonprofit, or revenue-generating activities."
I'd presume that business users would be using a commercial version.
"purchase commercial use rights"
Other then pages saying you could buy it, I was never able to find out how / how much, or even if it actually exists.
Lots of smaller companies have not upgraded to 2013.
If they have Office 365 you could buy a laptop and get full office and get some real work done.
I might have left out the rest of but MS left out VBA which means its still not fit for even the 2bit business I've worked for.
The people who are likely to road test this for a company are the very people who need VBA . Its not there.
If this review is correct, that this type of thing is ideal for limited productivity requirments (Office, Skype & Twitter) then three things spring to mind:-
- That seems a lot of money for those purposes
- Exactly what does Microkia bring to the party to deserve that price
- Shuttleworth's idea of a docked phone for the same productivity-style requirements looks quite far sighted,
But it seems an awfully risky proposition
@Just_this_guy - "I've seen an Android tablet - with keyboard - on sale for £50. I'm sure it's naff, performance-wise, but this Nokia costs TEN TIMES as much. Would it really feel TEN TIMES better?"
If you need to edit documents and spreadsheets, this tablet is probably infinitely better, since you won't be able to do that to any useful degree on your $50 tablet.
Actually if you look at the photo beneath, you can clearly see an Alt Gr key, and the Euro symbol is still the third symbol on the 4, same as a normal UK keyboard.
In other words, unless the author was talking about a built in soft keyboard and not the external keyboard ... I have no idea what he was on about..
"Has anyone succeeded flashing these Windows RT tablets with a Linux distro"
No, not so far - Windows RT is very secure. It's not like the Linux world where devices are hacked immediately on launch...
Even with the lowest level access to the OS, it is so far not possible to change it and have it still boot....
I mean, the review sounds pretty nice and even somewhat sound.
What bugs me is the File Manager laudatio. What the heck is good in having a "full file manager"? (I guess the author meant a Redmond-one).
How can I take your review serious after that? Is a "full file manager" what is actually needed on a useable tablet? And why would an alternative render it less suitable?
... because on iOS the file management is a complete cluster fuck* which means that I have to plug my tablet into a PC if I want to move files or to or off it it. If you want to transfer from tablet to tablet then you probably can't if you don't also have a laptop. This makes it a bit of pain by itself ...
The ability to push files to a USB key natively without needing iTunes from the device (or pull from a key) would be "really useful". I mean hell, its got a normal USB port and I can plug in a printer - sweet =)
* Caveat - it may have improved since I last tried - I gave up on my iPad for anything involving more than 1 or 2 files and switched to my laptop, as it was generally a much less painful experience. Nothing has yet convinced me to try again ...
i love my surface rt. it is a great portable device. no, it does not do everything a laptop/desktop with windows will do, but no one critisises the ipad for not doing evéything an osx desktop does. IT'S A TABLET, but as it doesmore than other tablets, everyone seems to think it should do everything. yes, you cannot install photoshop on it, but most (traditional) windows software would fill up the storage anyway. you can charge it, plug in a usb device (including a hard disc) and connect to an hdmi monitor ALL AT THE SAME TIME. try that with another tablet.
According some currency translations:
499 Euro is $682... and that is the price with the keyboard. The article reports $648... a $34 discrepancy.
The 399 Euro is $545.644 (without the keyboard), The article report $499 without the keyboard... a $46 discrepancy.
I'm used to Microsoft over charging for overseas sales... but still, this seems a bit odd, It is supposed to still be a foreign manufacture - I wasn't expecting the MS "tax" on it for overseas sales yet...
Can I plug in a USB peripheral? memory stick? share data with clients?
Can I use a USB cable to charge my phone? Headset?
Can I connect a bluetooth headset and make a phone call? or a 3.5mm headphone/mic & join a conference call?
Can I connect a video projector on a client site? with audio?
Any way to use cat5 internet connections? for customer sites that don't offer wifi?
No? not really a business device then.
> Can I plug in a USB peripheral? memory stick? share data with clients?
yes.
> Can I use a USB cable to charge my phone? Headset?
yes
> Can I connect a bluetooth headset and make a phone call? or a 3.5mm headphone/mic & join a conference call?
Yes to both.
> Can I connect a video projector on a client site? with audio?
Yes, via micro-HDMI
> Any way to use cat5 internet connections? for customer sites that don't offer wifi?
Yes, via USB->Ethernet.
> No? not really a business device then.
Except yes to all.
You're not good at this, are you?
Forgive me for asking a question, but who down-votes the above post?
If the corrections he's made are wrong, then sure downvote - but for the love all things post a reply correcting mistakes!
If the corrections he's made are spot on, then are you pissed because he made a semi-snarky remark at the end, or because you really wanted the tablet to be unable to do those things, and having someone shatter that dream pissed you off to no end?
I'm seriously asking, because I do not get it
@dogged - "Except yes to all.
You're not good at this, are you?"
=====================================
I've never held one, and even I knew the answers were almost universally "yes" to his questions. The only one I wasn't sure about was the 3.5mm headphone/mic.
It's actually a pretty amazingly capable device, when you get right down to it.
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