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(Music Playing) Hello and welcome to ITC Tech Share. I’m Tom Grissom. Today I’d like
to do an overview of the original Surface RT that has recently been updated to Windows
8.1. If you were an early adopter of the Surface RT tablet, I would highly recommend you upgrade
to 8.1, as it really has solved a lot of the performance issues. To begin with, I can really
tell this is Windows 8.1, because we have the large tile size. This was not available
in 8.0. This is the desktop icon. So if I press that tile, that will take me to my desktop
and you’ll see it looks somewhat like Windows 7, where I have the familiar task bar at the
very bottom. The RT version does not run X86 programs; however, they have ported Microsoft
Office 2013 over. So you can see that I have Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and One
Note pinned to my task bar down here. So if I’m doing Word documents, let me open up
Word just to show you the speed that’s available on the RT. This opens up Microsoft Word 2013.
Lets just do a blank document and while I’m here, let me just change the font size to
something a little bit larger so you can see. Just go down here and let me spin this around
so I can type. So “This is the Surface RT running Windows 8.1.” So you can see, very
easy. I have the type cover; they also have the touch cover. I much prefer the type cover,
because the keys actually give. You can use an optional stylus or you can use your finger,
but the stylus will give you a little more precision. So I’m going to go out to the
review tab. Since this is Word, it supports inking. So if I go to Review, Start Inking,
this will bring up my draw menu and now then, it turns into annotate, or highlight. So this
is extremely helpful for students or teachers taking notes and wanting to annotate, draw
some things free hand. So you can see, or if you’re taking notes and you need to draw
some three-dimensional object you can come out here. So you can see that this can essentially
be a white board. I can save this as a Word document and include the annotations or I
can discard them or I can save it as a PDF file and then e-mail it off to a student to
make corrections. So, very handy feature, and the annotations work in Word, Excel and
PowerPoint. So I’m going to close this, I’m going to click the red X. Do I want
to save, no, lets say don’t save. Now to get back to the start screen, there are many
different ways to do that. I can press the Windows Flag key on the actual tablet itself
and that will take me to the start screen. If I press it again, it takes me to the last
thing I had open and in this case the desktop. You will also notice that I have a Windows
Flag on the keyboard, the Windows key. So if I press that Windows key, it takes me to
the start screen. Press the Windows key again; it takes me to the desktop. You will also
notice in 8.1 I have the Windows Flag back in the lower left hand corner. So if I press
the Windows Flag down there, that will take me there. If I press the Windows Flag again,
that will take me back to the desktop. And then a fourth way, since this is a tablet,
let me get rid of the keyboard. This is a magnetic keyboard, very easy to use. It snaps
on, snaps off very easily. So you can hear the clicking and it’s very solid. It stays
connected very, very well. So let me pull that off since I’m finished with that. And
then, the kickstand is another feature. Once you use a tablet with a kickstand you are
lost without it. So it just simply snaps in and you can just snap it back out. The newer
model, the Surface 2, actually has another position that will recline this ever further,
but this is the original so we’ll stick with this one. Lets see, lets go ahead and
go back to the start screen. I’m holding this in landscape mode and Windows 8 uses
an Edge UI. So if you could think of a one pixel, imaginary border going around all the
outside along the bezel. Since it’s an Edge UI, it means whenever you swipe your finger
from the edge, it will bring up different functions. So let me swipe in with my thumb,
from the right hand side. Break that little one pixel border and that brings up my charms
bar. So from here I can do Search, Share, go to the start screen, devices or go to settings.
Very easy to do, I just swipe in, break that border. On the left hand side, if I swipe
in, I can actually bring up all the different applications. So this is multitasking in the
background, so here are the podcasts. This is our Tech Talk for Teachers podcasts. If
you’ve not subscribed, please do. This is one of the podcasts we do here at the ITC.
Lets swipe on through, here’s the desktop, swipe through. But it is very natural. If
I put my thumbs up here to hold the tablet like I would in landscape mode, I can very
quickly, with my thumb, just cycle through and you can see the speed improvements on
the Surface RT. So it is very fast and smooth. If I break the border just about a half-inch
and bring it back that will bring up what is called task manager. So if I want to go
immediately to my podcast, I can. Let me go back here to the start screen and lets open
up another app. Lets open up the weather app. I want to have something else out here. So
it just went out, updated, and this is the local weather information. So now then, if
I swipe through all the different things, you can see I now have the weather app available
to me as well. So you can see all the different, the radar and everything, available to me
there. But if I bring it in, bring it back, like I said just break that border about a
half-inch and bring it back in, and now if I want to go immediately to my travel app,
I can jump there. Really though, I mean this is so fast anymore that it is just as easy
just to cycle through if you only have half a dozen or fewer apps open, you can just very
quickly cycle through this way. Now while I’m in the Bing Travel app, let me just
show you something else that’s kind of neat. You go out here, do some of the different
destinations and things. So lets go to Miami, FL and they’ve made panoramas. This is a
little bit of local history, some maps and things if you were visiting the Miami area.
Photos, they do things called panoramas. So let me just come up here and go to the Cape
Florida Deck and if we bring this up. This is a 360-degree panorama, so it’s like looking
through a window. I don’t know if you can tell that through the camera or not. Let me
put up the kickstand. You can look down, you can look back up so I can go up to the sky
and go around. Or if I leave it stationary, put the stand back down here. I can move with
my finger. You can even pinch and zoom. Zoom in, zoom back out. Just take a look around
whatever your vacation spot is, if you’re lucky enough to get a panorama picture available
to you there. Now to get back, I can click this little back arrow there or to close out
an application, if I drag down from the top to the bottom. So once again, I’m starting
off the bezel, going down through and then pulling that down, that actually closes the
application out. So let me come up here and let me just close podcasts. So once again,
just bring it down and toss it all the way down to the bottom. My finger’s breaking
the plane, that one pixel border there, all the way. Lets go back to the weather and then
I can close that out. So now then, I just have the desktop and going back to the start
screen. The other very nice feature for teachers, USB’s. If you have a digital camera that
you’re taking SD card videos of, one of the problems with other tablets is that it
is difficult to share information back and forth. But if you have just a regular USB,
the Surface RT supports USB 2.0. The newer Surface’s do support the version 3.0. Let
me just come up here, there is a port. I don’t know if you can see there, it is a little
bit dark, but I can plug this in. Another huge feature, if I go back to my desktop,
I actually have a file manager. So this looks very much familiar if you use Windows. I can
go out here to my flash drive, open it up and there you can see what is available. Let
me just close this out, we don’t need that anymore and then lets just go back to the
start screen. So we’ll wrap it up here. You can see many of the different features
and things. We have the desktop available to us, many applications, Fotor a photo editing
app, Skype, you can do Skype sessions, sketchbook express as an artist, you can do kindle audible.
Many different applications now in the store so it’s not the problem that it used to
be whenever the Surface RT first came out. So, this is it. That’s a quick overview
of the Surface RT running Windows 8.1. (Music Playing)
Episode 30