Microsoft announced the launch of its own tablet computer branded as “Surface”

Tablet news are hitting headlines these days and tablets from Microsoft is the latest addition. Microsoft has announced in Los Angeles, California on June 19, 2012 about its plan to launch tablet computers soon. This is a major move in the industry as traditionally Microsoft has been involved in software development and remained dependent of its partners like Dell and HP for hardware design development and manufacturing.

However, details are awaited. Many features have come out to let users know about this latest launch from the tech giant. These tablets are slated to run on the Windows 8 operating system, the next generatio
OS from Microsoft. This is construed as a timely announcement as Windows 8 is in the final stages of its development and expected to be launched at the end of this year.

You will get this Surface tablet in two versions. The first one will be consumer oriented slates that are equipped with NVIDIA Tegra processor and will run on Windows RT. Windows RT is the operating system from Microsoft that has been specifically designed for devices that use ARM-based chips.

Another one is the professional version of the tablet that is equipped with an Intel core i5 chip and uses 86x-optimized Windows 8 version meant for mobile devices. This is particularly good for content creators and mainly designed for professional purposes.

Moving beyond the chip and OS, let us now get to the details of the design. You will find it equipped with a ‘kickstand’ for viewing content and a cover that is formed with the keyboard and touchpad again for content development. One other version of this tablet will include ‘TypeCover’ that is designed to resemble a keyboard.

While announcing the launch of these tablet computers, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said that although they are in talks with OEMs, but Microsoft also has a history of designing its own hardware that will portray the best designs in the industry. Some of the examples of hardware manufactured by Microsoft are Microsoft Mouse, the company's own keyboard and the Xbox game console and Xbox Kinect sensor accessory.

These tablets branded as ‘Surface’ will perform in an exemplary fashion as they are placed to compete in a thriving tablet market against the best selling Apple iPad and lot more other tablets running on Google’s Android. To overcome the competition successfully, it needs to be appropriate in terms of quality, capability and price.

"With Windows 8, we did not want to leave any scene uncovered," Ballmer said. He added "Much like Windows 1.0 we wanted to give Windows 8 our own companion hardware."

The company has offered Surface for Windows RT in a 32GB and 64GB models and placed them in the price range of other competing tablets. This was revealed by Microsoft. However, the professional version of Surface will be introduced in higher configuration like 64GB and 128GB that will be close to the prices of Windows-run ultra books.