Surface Pro for Australia next Thursday (30th May)

Microsoft will formally release their Surface Pro tablet in Australia next Thursday the 30th of May in both the 64GB and 128GB versions.

For those of you who might now be saying something like “I have already seen that at Harvey Norman stores” then I would have to correct you. You haven’t! You might have seen something that looks very much like it, but that was the just the regular Surface. It was not the Surface Pro.

So now some folk might be saying “Oh Well! It’s the same thing. Just the pro probably has a faster processor or more memory”. If you did then you would be wrong again. There is a MUCH bigger difference between the Surface and the Surface Pro.

Those people paying attention would know that the normal Surface only runs Windows 8 RT whereas the Surface Pro runs full Windows 8 Pro. And if you don’t know the difference between these two incarnations of Microsoft’s latest Windows operating system then you need to go back and find my posts about what the difference is. Because it is HUGE.

To give you a small hint you can run applications like Windows Live Writer, Vuze, Adobe Photoshop and/or Photoshop Elements (my current favourite photo editing tool), Adobe Lightroom, FireFox, Google Earth, HDR Express, and DxO Optics on a Windows 8 Pro computer, but you can’t run any of these on a Windows 8 RT computer.

So, in theory, as I have not tried it yet to see how well it works, you can do full photo post-processing on a Windows Surface Pro. This would be impossible on a Windows Surface because you cannot install the required tools.

I currently lug around a Toshiba Tecra A5 as my own personal portable computer. I have had this unit nigh on three years and it has been an awesome computer. It has an awesome colour-correct 1600x900 screen. This was a beautiful screen three years ago when I bought it and is still superior to almost all screens on all but the higher-end range of current laptop computers. But I am hoping to be able to replace this with a Surface Pro because there is nothing that cannot be connected to or used with the Surface Pro.

For those interested the Surface Pro is supposed to be available from the Australian online Microsoft Store (which you can find here or by clicking on the picture above), and from JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores, as from the 30th.