Microsoft Releases Batch of Windows 8 Input Devices 156
jones_supa writes "To accompany Windows 8, Microsoft has released some interesting keyboard and mouse devices, all of which are wireless and use Bluetooth. The Wedge Touch Mouse is an artful product shaped as an angular wedge, being compact enough for travel too. Wedge Mobile Keyboard follows the style of laptop keyboards and includes a snap-on cover. Sculpt Touch Mouse is more like a classic mouse, but features a four-way touch-scroll strip. Finally, we have Sculpt Mobile Keyboard, which is a lighter version of a classic curved keyboard. All four are on the expensive side, but at first blush seem high-quality."
Re:why no wires? (Score:4, Interesting)
Logitech also do a nice solar powered keyboard. My desk doesn't get any direct sunlight, and often I leave the lights off, but it always has plenty of charge. The batteries will apparently last 3 months even in complete darkness.
Now somebody needs to make some decent solar powered trackballs or trackpads and I'll be cable and battery free :)
Re:Microsoft make good hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll take Logitech over MS any day of the week, especially considering the differences in warranty policies. Heck, even Logitech pays both ways for shipping. That is if they even want the product back at all for warranty.
I can't speak for Logitech's warranty policies, but I've had to deal with MS once. I had one of the first laser mice (ball less?) that broke on me. I remember it came with a 5-year warranty. I called MS's support and the girl asked me when I purchased the mouse. I told her I wasn't sure, but it came with a 5 yr warranty and that type of mouse had not existed for 5 years. She laughed, took my address and sent me a brand new mouse. No questions asked. No sending my old mouse back. No receipt. No registration (who registers a mouse?). Nothing. Just here's your mouse. Thanks for playing... Love Microsoft.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
So basically you need a laptop.
Re:At the mercy of the designer and the consumer. (Score:3, Interesting)
The social and entertainment wankfest works, if it makes someone an advertising buck. The moment you're no longer earning for them, you're tossed on the street.
When it comes down to doing important things, it's a fucking disaster.
Config.sys? Yeah I remember that, setting IRQ7 and port 220h for my SoundBlaster AWE32. Hard times eh? Well compare that to trying to get VMWare ESX 4 talking to a SAN so I can persuade it that the LUN has more than 2Tb of capacity. Esp when your kit costs £0.5m a whack. Nope doesn't do it, so we have to fuck around and do volume spanning to get our desired 42Tb array (for storing real shit like financial documents and medical data, not pissy videos of your kids falling off shit and facebook wanking).
Autoexec.bat? Yeah I remember that, loading in my TSRs. Hard times eh? Well compare that to working out why the fuck an MS hotfix broke our entire .Net stack by setting cache expiry wrong, causing a problem with a certain version of IE8 which happened to be deployed to 20,000 of our client machines...
Haven't opened your PC since you bought it. We have 20x 48 Core Xeon boxes which needed assembly and arrive on pallets. That and 1540 workstations and laptops which need to be secured. We have 10-20 workstations cycled per week due to failures and users fucking them up.
I'm not doing it wrong - you're not doing enough to gain experience of how shitty it is. You are a consumer. You are the people who they bother to fix stuff for and the point of my email above. Unfortunately, what we do (the non consumerists), makes the world go round. Noone would blink an eye if half of the tech you mentioned above disappeared overnight.