Microsoft’s Surface hasn’t exactly exploded at the sales figure front , but with next-gen model pricing estimated at $7,600 and limited availability, we aren’t surprised that the table of the longer term hasn’t begun shooting up in hotels and retails stores across the world. Which can slowly change, however, with one of the vital recent models — Samsung’s SUR40 — finally arising for pre-order today. Enterprise customers (or deep-pocketed individuals) can reach out to dedicated sales reps in any of 23 countries to put an order, including the U.S. and Canada, parts of Asia, and most of Europe. An actual ship date has yet to be released, but don’t expect the 40-inch 1080p multitouch table to begin stoning up until early next year. Wish to start touching and tapping today? Look at our hands-on with an early SUR40 from CES.
A second, more retail-friendly version of Microsoft Surface is now available for pre-order in 23 countries. Earlier this week, Popular Science named the Samsung SUR40 a 2011 “Better of What’s New” award recipient.
REDMOND, Wash. – Nov. 17, 2011 – Shops searching for new, innovative how you can get hands-on with their customers will soon have a brand new tool – the Samsung SUR40.
Companies are already using Microsoft Surface to offer potential customers virtual tours of plane interiors, help them plan flights, provide them being able to create immersive photo books, and entice bank customers into brick and mortar branches. Those experiences only hint at how the hot Surface device would be capable of help businesses engage with customers, said Somanna Palacanda, director of Microsoft Surface.
“With what’s happening on earth of touch and the truth that touch is becoming ubiquitous, persons are searching for more immersive relationships with screens,” he said. “The recent Surface takes technology that’s always existed within the backs of stores and brings it front and center. So now customers and retailers can interact together, a health care provider and a patient could have a more immersive consulting experience, and a banker and a customer can sit together and work on a simulation where in past the banker often is the just one on top of things.”
Samsung and Microsoft announced today that a brand new, more versatile Microsoft Surface device is now available for pre-order, the near final stop on its journey from lab to marketplace. Now, businesses in 23 countries can visit the Samsung website to locate an area reseller and place an order for the Samsung SUR40. Shipments are expected to begin early next year.
The Samsung SUR40 was just named a 2011 “Better of What’s New” award winner by Popular Science magazine and is featured in a different awards issue currently on newsstands. Corinne Iozzio, senior associate editor at Popular Science, said the magazine’s editors were impressed with the update to the unique Surface, a 2008 “Better of What’s New” winner.
“We greatly liked the assumption of the package of the outside, which had packed quite a bit computing intelligence and such a lot sensor technology into any such thin package,” she said. “It is a tabletop which might be put anywhere without harming the functionality and actually makes a system just like the Surface so much more accessible.”
The Samsung SUR40 also earned strong praise by the likes of Forbes and Gizmodo when released on the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year.
Palacanda said the brand new Surface device incorporates each of the key features of the unique – an enormous multi-touch screen, the facility to acknowledge fingers, blobs, and objects – in addition to PixelSense, a brand new technology that lets LCD panels “see” without the usage of actual cameras. The technology has helped slim down the second one version of the skin device and enables a brand new form factor – one who could be turned on its side. With a screen that’s only four inches thin, customers could have the choice to apply the Samsung SUR40 horizontally as a table, hang it on a wall, or embed it into furniture, Palacanda said.
“We listened to our partners and customers’ requests for a lighter and thinner form factor that offers them flexibility because there isn’t any one-size-fits-all within the retail space,” he said.
Several existing Surface customers, including Dassault Aviation, Fujifilm Corp. and the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), plan to take advantage of the Samsung SUR40 in locations around the world early next year. RBC is already using the primary version of Surface as a brand new medium to have interaction with its customers, Palacanda said.
He explained that RBC is redesigning their stores to provide customers a brand new retail experience, where Surface is playing a significant part. As an example, RBC launched an instantaneous mail campaign to ask their customers into their stores through a sweepstakes. When customers visit, they drop their brochure onto the outside machine to determine if they’ve won a prize. Simultaneously, RBC employees can use Surface to spotlight the bank’s services and products.
The effects encouraged RBC, Palacanda said. a standard junk mail response rate is lower than 1 percent; RBC is seeing a conversion of above 10 percent.
“We’ve always spoken about collaboration from a computing standpoint, but before Microsoft Surface we truly didn’t have a tool where two or more people could actually engage in conjunction with an identical piece of digital content,” Palacanda said. “i suspect this announcement is step one in delivering a next generation device that improves even further at the original Surface experience, which enables two or more people to collaborate in a really meaningful way.”
The recent device can be well liked by developers, said Luis Cabrera-Cordón, senior program manager for Microsoft Surface. The outside 2.0 software developer kit (SDK) was released at MIX11 in April, and already it has been downloaded greater than 7,000 times.
The SDK features an input simulator that allows developers to write down Surface applications on any Windows 7 PC, an approach Cabrera-Cordón called “Write once, touch anywhere.”
“The SDK allows developers to write down a single application that will adapt to every kind of sorts of hardware,” he said. “That makes for an incredible investment: they will target Microsoft Surface hardware in addition to any Windows 7 touch-enabled PC. It is a flexible platform so developers can create the only user interface for the man actually using the pc.”
Cabrera-Cordón encouraged developers to download the SDK and begin building apps because the Samsung SUR40′s release date draws near.
“Touch apps are a place it truly is new. There’s a lot to find and innovate on,” Cabrera-Cordón said. “And that i hope that by twiddling with the outside 2.0 SDK, they’ll discover they are able to innovate and create things that we do not have today.”
LG’s upcoming MWC lineup runs into some Italians, gets documented on video
Everything Everywhere promises ‘small-scale LTE launch’ in UK by the top of 2012
