Windows 10 Announcements October 26 – 28-Inch Surface Studio AIO, More Powerful Surface Book, Windows 10 Update Preview, New Surface Keyboards And Mouse

Microsoft announced new products and features at their Windows 10 event in New York today on October 26, ranging from an upgraded Surface Book, to the 28-inch Microsoft Surface Studio AIO, a new dash button called Surface Dial, other peripherals, and upcoming Windows 10 updates.

The next Windows 10 update will be released for free in the spring of 2017, and it will be called Windows 10 Creators Update.

There will be a lot of new features in the Creators Update, focusing particularly on 3D experiences, by making 3D more easy to access, create, share, and experience.

In practise that includes a new Windows Paint app called Paint 3D where you can create 3D objects, integrate them in Powerpoint, share it with others, print it in 3D, or view it with Hololens or new similar hardware that HP, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Acer will launch for Windows soon, starting at $299, making 3D more accessible to everyone.

This can become practical, like for instance using virtual reality and augmented reality to look at interior objects like chairs on the web, and then try the same interior objects in your own home, to see how it would look right in front of you.

On the gaming front, the Windows 10 Creators Update will make it possible for everyone to become a game broadcaster where real time gameplay can be shared across devices such as computers, tablets, and phones, or you can set up gaming communities or clubs, create custom tournaments, and those kinds of things without paying for it or using other apps or services.

Then a very fresh update is “Your People” that will integrate Skype, SMS, email and other real time communication, that makes it easier and faster to share things with people we tend to communicate with the most.

It will enable us to share images, documents, or send messages, from anywhere in Windows in real time, and with the Shoulder Taps, emojis or other animated icons will make it possible for those on our contact list to express themselves to us and vice versa without sending a message and just activate an emoji instead.

Surface team chief Panos Panay then announced two new Surface products for 2016-2017.

The first one is the new Surface Book i7 aka “Surface Book with Performance Base” with Intel Core i7 processor, an even more powerful GPU, and 30% more battery life, now at as much as 16 hours.

Surface Book with Performance Base

The biggest announcement though was the much awaited Surface AIO, called Surface Studio by Microsoft, since Microsoft wants us to think of this a “studio” device for some serious creativity, and it certainly is powerful.

Surface Studio has all the Surface attributes, such as a touch screen, pen input, and those types of features, but is a 28-inch desktop computer with adjustable stand, which is strong enough for us to lean on.

The 28-inch screen has a whopping 4500 x 3000 resolution display, with individual color calibration which is sure to win this display some display awards. Surface Studio will be sold in three configurations, ranging from a 6th gen. Intel Core i5 model with 8GB of RAM and 1TB storage, to a Intel Core i7 model with 16GB of RAM and 1TB storage, to the best model with Intel Core i7 processor, a massive 32GB of RAM, and also 2TB of storage. The price starts at $2,999, and it will be launched in the US on December 15, just ahead of the holidays.

Surface Studio 32GB RAM

Microsoft also announced other peripherals, such as the Surface Dial, which is an extension of the scroll wheel on a mouse, and it works with both the Surface Studio as well as the latest Surface tablets. It can be used to adjust the volume on music, scroll pages, access shortcuts, used for editing, etc.

Surface Dial

Surface Keyboard is Microsoft’s newest minimalist keyboard, and evolution of its former self, meant to take up as little space on a desk as possible. It’s a wireless Bluetooth keyboard with a 15 meter range, and support for Windows (including Windows 10 phone), Android, iOS, and Mac OS.

Surface Keyboard

Surface Ergonomic Keyboard is a new Microsoft keyboard covered by the same two-tone grey mélange Alcantara that can be found on the high-end Surface Pro 4 covers. It has a 10 meter range, and connects via Bluetooth 4.0/4.1.

Surface Ergonomic Keyboard

Surface Mouse is the mouse we have covered in our prior leaks, and goes along with the Surface Studio, but can also be bought separately for $49. It works with anything from Windows devices to, Android devices and Macs. It connects via low energy Bluetooth, and has as such a long battery life.

Surface Mouse

– Tom Bowen

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Hands on with the HP ZBook 17 G3 portable workstation

Last year, when we went hands on with the G2 version of HP’s flagship mobile engineering workstation, the ZBook 17, we found its power and display were incredibly impressive. Nonetheless, its large-size, high-price, and short battery life made it an unlikely purchase for anyone for whom the power and extensibility weren’t vital.

HP has now upgraded the machine all-around to the new G3 version. After spending some time with the G3 ($2,150 and up), we found the improvements are indeed significant. It’s still not for the faint of heart, but the new version is lighter, cooler, smaller, has a longer-life battery, and yet is also more powerful. In addition, HP has also reconfigured its ZBook product line, adding what will likely be a popular new model, the ZBook Studio.

It used to be that to do serious engineering work, you needed a monster desktop souped up with a massive graphics card. That is changing rapidly. Last year, when we reviewed the G2, you could get all the compute power that your desktop had a few years prior in a laptop that weighs under 10 pounds. Now, with the G3, you can get even more power in a unit that weighs in at less than 7 pounds.

HP’s G3 ZBooks — on the left — are noticeably smaller and lighter than the previous G2 versions

Desktop performance that you can take on the road

While there are a few users that purchase a 17-inch ZBook simply because they need the large screen — or amazing color of HP’s DreamColor displays — most buyers are in it for the performance. On that score, the ZBook 17 delivers. You can get a system with up to 64GB of ECC memory, over 4TB of storage, and Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 for expansion — all powered by a 6th generation Core i7 or Xeon processor.

Photo manipulation in Photoshop and Lightroom is even better than on the G2. It was as fast and smooth as on my last-gen GPU-assisted quad-core i7 desktop. My review unit was packed with the high-end Nvidia Quadro M5000M 8GB mobile GPU.

The review unit ZBook 17 G3 I’ve been evaluating is also the first laptop that feels powerful enough to do some solid machine learning projects. Its Quadro GPU is 30x faster than a 4GHz i7 at training networks, and the roomy 64GB of system memory, and 8GB on the GPU itself,  allow fairly-large datasets — even those including images — to be accessed quickly. The ZBook score 2229 on Fire Strike Ultra — definitely respectable compare to the 5200 score of my high-end 1080 GPU.

Windows 10 and UHD finally arrive for engineers

One of the last market segments to be dragged into the ultra-high-resolution display, Windows-10 era has been engineering laptops. Only recently have many of the major scientific and engineering applications been certified on Windows 10, and it also wasn’t until recently that mobile GPUs had the power to run graphics-intensive applications at UHD resolution. Finally, with the G3, ZBook users won’t have to compromise on either of these. You can get a new ZBook with Windows 10, and optionally with a UHD display. Some models are even available with an optional touch screen (although only at 1080p resolution).

You can get dreamy color, but beware the battery life

Like with the G2, the unit I reviewed had a really bright and gorgeous-looking DreamColor LCD. Its gamut is larger than Adobe RGB, and it can be set either to one of several default colorspaces, or matched to a custom colorspace — which is apparently quite popular among HP’s Hollywood customers. New for the G3 and 2016, the DreamColor display is 3840 x 2160 — conveniently quadruple 1080p for easy application scaling. The DreamColor is an option, which is probably a good thing, since it still forces the unit to rely on the discrete GPU at all times. That cuts battery life quite a bit.

Fortunately for engineers everywhere, the ZBook G3 models all benefit from dramatic battery life increases over the G2 versions. HP claims an overall 42% increase in battery life for the ZBook 15 G3 and 72% for the ZBook 17 G3 — around 16 hours using HP’s battery benchmark, although of course users are unlikely to see anything close to that in practice.

HP upgrades its Z Turbo SSD performance

With G2, HP introduced PCIe SSDs, as part of a technology it called Z Turbo. The G3 pushes the SSD performance envelope further, with NVMe PCIe SSDs. It claims around double the throughput for the new interface — as much as 2 GB/s sequential read performance.

MacBook Pro users will be quick to point out that its newest models also feature PCIe-connected system SSDs, but we’ll have to wait for the expected MBP refresh this fall to see if Apple does something similar to HP’s NVMe-based interface.

As part of its commitment to ensuring your ZBook will perform its best, HP bundles its Performance Advisor software with the units. It also features an excellent Support Assistant, that manages needed updates from Microsoft and HP, and messages from HP. As a Dell XPS owner, I’ve always been unhappy with how the Dell Update tools work. By comparison, HP’s ZBook management and update tools are excellent — easy to understand, comprehensive, and effective at finding and installing updates.

Don’t be fooled by the base price

The base price for a dual-core ZBook 17 G3 is starts at just over $2,000. For that, though, you get a pretty minimalist configuration. You can spend another several thousand dollars if you want a top-of-the-line version with DreamColor display, larger SSD, more RAM, or a beefy Nvidia GPU. The review unit I tested prices out at an eye-watering $7,100 — including 64GB of RAM, DreamColor display, 2 512GB SSDs, a Xeon E3-1575M CPU, and Nvidia Quadro M5000M GPU with 8GB of memory.

Personally, being cheap, I often buy laptops with the minimal specs and then upgrade them myself — except for processor and GPU. However, part of the appeal of the ZBook like is HP’s extensive support and ISV certification offerings, so it seems unlikely too many of their customers go that route. HP does make it simple to add more storage and memory, though, with a simple-to-open, tool-free back cover that reveals two drive bays and the second two memory slots (the first two populated are located under the keyboard). This will be especially useful for those who want to swap drives on a shared computer, or have different projects on different drives.

The ZBook 17 also features HP’s dock connector which, combined with the unit’s own extensibility and computing power, means that if you can live with the price, you won’t have to make many compromises with this machine as your primary computer. The ZBook 17’s built-in keyboard is massive and full-featured, and includes a TrackPoint-like stick, touchpad, and numeric keypad. Even fickle typists are unlikely to find they need to add an external keyboard.

I went into this review focused mainly on the ZBook 17, but have become even more intrigued by the new ZBook Studio that features a 15.6-inch display and quad-core CPU. It seems to offer the kind of high-end performance many professionals need, but at an amazingly light 4.4 pounds — similar to a MacBook Pro 15 or the Dell XPS 15, but with more impressive raw performance specs.

An increasing number of engineers I talk to are using mobile workstations as their primary machines, even at the office. Part of that is due to the growth in tools being run on the network or in the cloud, part is because of the growth in mobile usage scenarios, and part is because mobile workstations (and high-end laptops) have gotten good enough that they can deliver performance even under a demanding engineering workload.

Now read: The best laptops for engineers and engineering students: when work requires a real workstation

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Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 First Look

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The Smaller, Lighter MacBook Pros With 'Touch Bar' Controllers Are Real

Apple today launched its latest MacBook Pro models at an event timed to mark the 25th anniversary of the original PowerBook, held at its campus in Cupertino. The new MacBook Pros feature a completely new design, faster components, and an innovative (and highly leaked) multi-touch screen-cum-controller. 13-inch and 15-inch models are set to be available within three weeks in the US, starting at $1799 and $2399. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and Touch ID will be priced starting at Rs. 1,55,900 while the 15-inch model will start at Rs. 2,05,900.

The most innovative feature is of course the multi-touch control strip which replaces the Fn key row. Apple has named it Touch Bar, and it is fully interactive and context-sensitive. It shows simple system-side commands including a dedicated Siri shortcut, but adapts to different apps and workflows within them. Demonstrations on stage at the event showed dozens of possible uses, including word autocomplete suggestions when typing, email composition and filing tools, Photoshop tool selection and manipulation controls, DJ scratching and mixing, and scrubbing a timeline while editing video.

Applications can show content full-screen while controls are moved to the Touch Bar. Multi-touch gestures mean that things such as a waveform or timeline can be manipulated directly. For those who need the traditional Fn keys, they are still available too. For those who need the traditional keys or find the new models too expensive, there is also a 13-inch model without the Touch Bar, starting at $1499 or Rs. 1,29,900 in India.

The new MacBook Pro models also feature Touch ID sensors integrated into the power button. Apple detailed a new chassis design which actually makes the 13-inch MacBook Pro smaller and thinner than the 13-inch MacBook Air. A new design for the speakers allows them to push more air, resulting in a claimed 2x improvement in dynamic range and better bass reproduction. The speakers are now placed on either side of the keyboard.

Common minimum specifications include 6th-gen Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSDs. The 13-inch model's screen has a resolution of 2560x1600, and it uses integrated Intel Iris 540 graphics. The 15-inch model has a native 2880x1800 resolution and features AMD Radeon Pro graphics.

The models with Touch Bar feature four USB Type-C ports which support Thunderbolt 3 as well as USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds, while the one without Touch Bar has only two ports. Apple also detailed a new Thunderbolt 3 5K monitor developed in partnership with LG, which will work as a dock to charge a MacBook Pro while also featuring breakout ports for other devices, plus a webcam, speakers and mic array.

Disclosure: Gadgets 360's travel and hotel for the event in Cupertino were sponsored by Apple.

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