Big hurdle facing Windows 8 tablet adoption

Well, I did my part. I'm the one person who bought a Surface RT.

(Well, actually, me and Mary Jo Foley.)

Yeah, I don't know many (aside from tech geek friends) who said, "you know, what I really, really need is a full computer system in a small tablet form factor". People want battery life, they want lower prices, they want basic internet and social media functionality. A $500 Windows RT device and $1000 Surface Pro wasn't quite what they wanted.

But that's not even close to what the typical consumer wants in a tablet. They just want a big phone screen with apps.

Click to expand...

Yep.

Maybe it's just a matter of what somebody is exposed to first. Seems like the iPad kind of got it right when it came out and stole a lot of the momentum. Now all tablets and/or slates (and even hybrids) are compared to it. But the funny thing is, I notice things like when my young niece and nephew come over, they are brimming with excitement when they know they can play on my Surface. It's like, what they don't know won't hurt them ... sure, it has a "desktop" of some sorts and it runs Office, but they don't need to know that. The well-done games from the Windows Store blow them away.

Many of the XBOX-labelled games on Windows 8/RT are really well done and polished, especially Microsoft's own set of games. I'm talking games like Solitaire Collection, Minesweeper, Taptiles, Mahjong, Pinball FX2, Monsters Love Candy, etc.

However, I find many of the third party exclusive offerings to be very poorly put together. Most are using Comic Sans for a font, with rounded black borders and flood-fill gradients everywhere and they just look BAD. I've seen a memory matching game where @ 1920x1080 the card graphics are blocky, distorted, pixellated because (a) they are using low res images and (b) they are using NEAREST_NEIGHBOR filtering. This is on top of the overall UI looking extremely childish and amateurish. Why are so many Windows 8 apps looking like this? It's an eyesore.

Lastly, the Windows 8/RT store is extremely lacking in titles. You got a handful of good ones (the XBOX-labelled ones I mentioned before for instance), and some of the later versions of Angry Birds and whatnot. Then beyond that, you got.. a bunch of junk. Ugly, poorly made junk. A huge chunk of popular apps/games on iOS and Android have never been ported over. This is also true on Windows Phone 8, so you know... without a lot of big names existing on Microsoft's platform, who's ever going to want to pick Windows RT/phone over iOS or Android for a tablet device?

The surface pro is a lot more viable because it has higher res screen, way better specs, and proper x86_64 windows 8 with your familiar suite of desktop applications/games to install and use. RT doesn't have near enough of a familiar selection right now. I reckon if your big name app developers jumped on board with the Windows Phone 8/RT platform and ported their popular apps over, more people would be interested and get far more use out of Microsoft's devices than they do today. And for the love of God, app developers for Windows 8 need to step up their game on the design and polish of their apps! Stop using comic sans and thrown-together outline buttons!

^^ Too true