Microsoft unveil Surface Tablet

Microsoft unveiled its unique Surface tablets to the world This new Microsoft Surface device could be said to relate more closely to the active form of the word in question. That is, the verb: to rise up -- for something to appear that was not there before. It's a very apt definition for what Microsoft is doing, attempting to go from zero to hero on the tablet hardware front in just one shot. Is this, the Surface for Windows RT, good enough to erase decades of mediocre touchscreen Windows devices? Will it help Microsoft and its latest operating systems float up to the top of the tablet hierarchy? It's not an easy feat to make a tablet that looks or feels different from those hundreds of slabs that have come before, yet this Surface is indeed quite distinctive on both fronts. It's genuinely hard to differentiate our visual impressions from our tactile ones. The exterior of the slate is a cool, matte surface that looks dark and feels quite strong and durable. Under the hood, the Microsoft Surface purrs along on 2GB of RAM and a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra Quad-Core T30 chip, the same processor powering other Windows RT tablets, like the ASUS VivoTab RT. Since we're not yet aware of any benchmarks tailored to this operating system, we'll stand on this: Tegra 3 Quad-Core Processor is more than capable of handling Windows RT's Live Tiles and Modern UI. The tablet cold-boots in just under 25 seconds and launches apps briskly. It responds smoothly to taps and swipes, and we also found that the tablet is quick to respond if you open an app, change your mind and hit the home button before the app is finished loading.