Windows 8 fondleslabs rock up on eBay
Premium price for Microsoft fiddling
Can't wait to touch and poke a Windows 8 fondleslab? Well now you can, but it'll cost you big bucks.
A trio of Samsung tablets running the developer preview of Windows 8, which were dished out to 5,000 attendees of Microsoft's BUILD Conference, have popped up on auction site eBay.
Microsoft has not yet given a release date for Windows 8 and has not named any of the OEM partners who will be making tablets for its operating system.
The price for the 64GB Samsung tablets, at the time of writing, was breaking the $2,000-barrier mark, compared to about $700 for a similar spec'd iPad - the gadget Microsoft is gunning for.
One machine has gone to a successful bidder for $2,700, while the bid price on another has jumped from a bid of $1,225 when the tablets were first detected here by Win Rumors, to $2,025.
A third was going priced $2,385, at the time of writing.
Bidders are taking their chances; these handsomely spec'd devices are running an early unfinished build of Windows 8. Microsoft only released the developer build of Win 8 last week, and it lacks the final polish of the interface and web store that will target consumers. ®
COMMENTS
This is excellent news!
I for one welcome our new Apple-business-model Micro$oft. They've managed to find a way to start the meme that their fondleslabs are _even more expensive_ than iPads, and do it via a (sort of) product leak!
Great stuff, and nobody needs to get arrested to make it work.
Apples & well never mind ...
You can’t really say that this tablet PC is has similar specs to an iPad, it’s like comparing a Porsche 911 to an F1 Ferrari. A Porsche 911is fast and for the consumer, but an F1 Ferrari is not mass produced and is not designed for the road.
Back to the point, The Windows 8 Build Developer Tablet, is exactly that, a developer tablet. Its for the track not the road. Plus it has quite higher specs than an iPad. Sandy Bridge Core i5. 4gb DDR3 USB HDMI . . .
As regards the price, is it really that unreasonable, the meerkats toys that you get when signing up for insurance from comparethemarket.com sell on ebay for around £150. Exclusive free stuff always sells on the ol’ bay for a lot more than its true value. But thats life . . .
Andoid?
Has Cyanogen started work on the Android port yet?
Core i5 + 4GB RAM + 64GB SSD
Yep, pretty much minimum requirements to run a MS OS these days.
I predict that when Win8 tablets ship they will ALL be highly specc'ed devices like this one that are heavy, expensive and have really crappy battery life.
The often promised inexpensive and lightweight ARM tablets will be "real soon now" for a year or two, only to be embarrassingly canceled to be remembered as yet another technical failure on the part of a company who have clearly lost their mojo ( which happened back in the early 2000's, natch)
The sooner MS get back to their core business (patent trolling) the better.
