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I ditched my cell phone just prior to retirement and have had a landline for a few years now along with a laptop. All my kids were like huh?? I told them if they want to call-call & if I'm not home leave a message or otherwise contact me thru email, etc... Well, OF COURSE, their age group DOESN"T EMAIL, they TEXT. but it hasn't stopped us from communicating. I took the plunge before Black Friday and purchased their cheapest tablet @ 49.99. Snot nose techies may deride & degrade it but to me it's really nice and it came...

Ars Technica UK published an article that might be of interest to those of you considering purchasing or already owning a Tablet. In summary, and in comparison with other similar tablets the Fire tablet comes out surprisingly well.

Microsoft may have just personally revived the Mac-vs.-Windows debates of yesteryear with its introduction of the Surface Book, the first-ever laptop to come out of Redmond, Calif. With its silver chassis and 13.5-inch display, the Surface Book invites comparisons to Apple's MacBook Pro. So how does the Surface Book stack up against Apple's 13-inch professional laptop?Design: Surface Book's Display Pulls Double Duty At 12.3 x 9.1 x 0.5-0.90, the tapered Surface Book is just a little bit larger than the 13-inch MacBook Pro (12.35 x 8.6 x 0.7 inches). Of course, that modestly larger size allows the Surface Book...

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its first laptop: the Microsoft Surface Book, a 13-inch touch-screen device that also comes apart to become a tablet. "This is the ultimate laptop," Microsoft's Panos Panay said. It has two processors and a dedicated graphics-card system. Microsoft says the laptop is twice as fast as a Macbook Pro. Pricing starts at $1,499, and the laptop will be available on October 26. As with many devices in the Surface line, the Surface Book can detach from its keyboard to become a tablet. The keyboard can then dock on the back of the tablet to keep it...

Well this came out of nowhere. After years of pleading from PC enthusiasts, Microsoft finally revealed an ultra-premium Surface laptop, dubbed Surface Book, at its hardware event on Tuesday—a portable PC designed to embrace Windows 10’s most cutting-edge features, and one that’s just oozing style. If the Surface Pro is a tablet that can replace your laptop, as Microsoft’s marketing crowed last year, does that make the Surface laptop a laptop that can replace your tablet that replaces your laptop? Not quite. Both aim for different targets. While the Surface tablets were initially introduced to highlight the sort of mobile...

In 2012, when Microsoft first introduced the Surface Pro — a tablet that was also a laptop — it became an industry punch line. “You can merge a toaster and a refrigerator, but that’s probably not going to be pleasing to anyone," quipped Apple CEO Tim Cook. Nobody's laughing now. And Microsoft is looking more and more like a trendsetter. Three years after Cook's jab, the Surface Pro 3 is selling strong — strong enough that Microsoft is expected to launch a much-anticipated Surface Pro 4 at a special event on Tuesday. In the meantime, Apple and Google have started...

My brother just acquired a MS Surface 3 tablet. He wanted to know how to connect it to a TV and "mirror" the table image on to the TV (not wireless but with wires). Any advice?

The race is on around the world as scientists strive to develop a new generation of batteries that can perform beyond the limits of the current lithium-ion based battery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have taken a significant step toward the development of a battery that could outperform the lithium-ion technology used in electric cars such as the Chevy Volt. They have shown they can replace the lithium ions, each of which carries a single positive charge, with magnesium ions, which have a plus-two charge, in battery-like chemical reactions, using an electrode with a structure like those...

Announcing Surface 3 When we developed Surface Pro 3, we set out to design the tablet that can truly replace your laptop – even your high-end laptop. Today we feel both fortunate and proud that the vision of Surface has become a reality with so many people using Pro 3 and loving the experience... he result is Surface 3, as well as a mobile-broadband version, Surface 3 (4G LTE). It’s the thinnest and lightest Surface we’ve ever shipped. It runs full Windows, including desktop applications. It includes a one-year subscription to Office 365 to help you really get down to...

Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Surface Pro 3 tablet-notebook convertible computer is selling surprisingly well this holiday season, Pacific Crest Securities reported. Pacific Crest analyst Brendan Barnicle called the Surface Pro 3 "Santa's surprise," saying the device could help Microsoft post revenue upside for the December quarter. Surface Pro 3 sales provided a similar boost to Microsoft's revenue in the September quarter, he said. Barnicle raised his estimates for Microsoft's December quarter, its fiscal Q2. He reiterated his outperform rating on the stock with a price target of 58. Microsoft was up 1.5%, near 48.50, in afternoon trading in the stock market today....

Scuffles between shoppers have been breaking out across the country as bargain hunters fight over TVs, tablets and even Barbie dolls during the first of the holiday sales. Many big-box stores opened early Thursday night, in an attempt to dilute the chaos of Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving when stores usually start their reductions for the season. But several videos have now surfaced online showing that even on a holiday dedicated to sharing, some people will turn against each other to save money. One of the videos uploaded to YouTube Thursday night, show a handful of men and...

Hello Freepers. Chickensoup is spending money again. I have to do a tech upgrade. I am buying a tablet! The little ones that people use when they don't want to be tied to the big one. So, I have decided what tablet to buy, it is an Asus Transformer 10inch. 64K and most likely with the 500 GB in the keyboard. However there seems to be versions upon versions and no one to talk to. The nice boy at Best Buy kept pointing to the one he had and said that was the one to buy. At Amazon there seems...

“Just months after selling its ailing handsets business to Microsoft, the Finnish company is planning to go back into the consumer market with a new tablet,” Matti Huuhtanen reports for The Associated Press. “It will launch a 7.9-inch device early next year in China, the world’s biggest market, before selling it elsewhere.” “The device will be manufactured by Foxconn, which makes Apple’s handsets. And it will operate Android instead of the Windows software Nokia used on its cellphones when it began a partnership with Microsoft in 2011. That partnership ended unsuccessfully — in April, Nokia sold its cellphones unit to...

After two years and nearly $2 billion in losses, Microsoft's Surface turned a profit in the September quarter, the company said Thursday. For the three months ending Sept. 30, Microsoft recorded $908 million in revenue for the Surface tablet line, an increase of 127% over the same quarter in 2013. The nearly one billion in revenue was a one-quarter record for the Surface, and beat the combined revenue of the previous two quarters. Using information in Microsoft's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as well as data from earlier quarters, Computerworld calculated the quarter's cost of that...

Microsoft is looking to profit from the back-to-school shopping season by introducing a temporary price drop on all versions of the Surface Pro 3. The discount cuts the price of the cheapest Surface Pro 3 model from $799 to $649. The entry level model has an Intel i3 processor, 64 GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. The $150 discount is also being implemented on the $999, $1,299 and $1,549 versions of the device. The $999 variant has Intel Core i5 processor, 128 GB of storage and 4GB of RAM. The $1,299 version has an Intel i5 processor, 256GB of...

It was called the wave of the future—the recently tapped U.S. ambassador to Switzerland was sworn in last month with her hand not on a paper Bible, but on top of a Kindle. Techies called it revolutionary and applauded Suzi Levine for making history. But she wasn’t the only one who went high-tech when she took the oath of office. A county executive from Long Island, N.Y., used the Bible app on an iPad to be sworn in last year and a few months ago a group of firefighters from New Jersey huddled around a Kindle Bible when they took...

If you think Windows tablets are too darn expensive, Toshiba wants a word with you. The company's latest tablets, called Encore 2, run full Windows 8.1 and start at just $199. For that price, you get an 8-inch tablet with 1,280 x 800 resolution and a quad-core processor. It's powered by a quad-core Atom chip with 1GB of RAM, and there's 32GB of storage, which you can augment with a microSD card. Battery life is rated at up to 10 hours, and Toshiba offers a 10-inch version with almost exactly the same specs for $269. To hit those price points,...

It turns out that support page name-checking the Surface Pro 3 wasn't a typo after all. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the all-new Surface Pro 3, but this version is more than a mere spec boost over the Surface Pro 2: It's a whole new entry in the Surface lineup, and one designed "to replace your laptop." The Surface Pro 3 blends full Core i7 power—Surface head Panos Panay calls it "the thinnest Core product ever created," designed in close conjunction with Intel—with true tablet sleekness, sheer screen size aside. The Surface Pro 3 measures in at a mere 0.35-inch thick...

As recently as a couple of quarters ago, analysts were convinced that tablet growth rates would be stratospheric forever, or at least until a few billion people had one.Apple, it was said, was no longer going to be "the iPhone company." It was going to be "the iPad company." And analysts were frantically calculating how much money Apple was going to coin once it was selling more iPads than iPhones.Well, those forecasts aren't looking so promising anymore.Tablet growth has slowed sharply over the past few quarters. And tablet growth at Apple has hit a wall. BII Business Insider Analysts have...

Asking for opinions on the best budget tablet. Something big enough for me to work on -- i.e., be able to type easily and see the display without holding it six inches from my face. Not worried about communications -- as long as it's got WiFi built in (which I'm sure they all do), I can use my cellphone as a mobile hotspot to transfer/send files. This is intended to be a replacement for a working laptop/notebook. And again -- "budget" is the keyword. Thanks all!.