Dell Dumps Keyboardless Windows RT Tablets 186
jfruh writes "On Friday, Dell was selling Windows RT tablets for as low as $300. By this morning, the cheapest one on offer was $479. The difference? The only tablets they're selling now come bundled with keyboards, which may indicate that customers are finding even the Metro-focused RT version of Windows 8 too irritating to navigate by touch alone. (If you really want a 10-inch Dell tablet without a keyboard it looks like you can still get one on Amazon, at least for the time being.)"
"Press F1 to continue..." (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine is a teacher. Her school got a bunch of these keyboardless RT tablets, one for each student. She brought hers out to our writer's group last night with the intention of getting sued to it.
It wouldn't boot up, so her techie boyfriend started messing with it, He got it to boot to an error message of the "Press F1 to continue" variety...
...on a keyboardless tablet. He and I had a good laugh.
Re:not low enough (Score:5, Interesting)
$179 for a keyboard?
WTF?
It's *kind of* cracked. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an exploit to load NT kernel drivers at near-boot time on RT tablets. It's not as good as a true Secure Boot exploit, but in theory it would be good enough to make a Linux/Android build for Surface RT.
Screenshot [twitter.com] of my Surface RT running Windows RT with a kernel debugger, which should not be possible under Microsoft's Secure Boot configuration.
Re:not low enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows RT is a real OS. The stock software load isn't as feature complete as I'd like, but I've found it to be less maddening to use than any experience I've had with iOS. The Metro interface definitely takes some adjustment and I'm not terribly fond of Microsoft's on-screen keyboard, but I suspect that if Surface tablets had been priced at $250 WITH THE KEYBOARD, they would not be a huge joke in the market that they have been so far. It might've been predatory pricing to gain market share, but the biggest mistake Microsoft made with the basic model Surface was assuming that it was on-par with the lifestyle brand that is Apple and that its offering would be treated as such.
Re:not low enough (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a real OS with artificial barriers put in place to drive users into Microsoft's walled garden.