Windows RT has been of interest to me since before it launched alongside the regular Windows 8 operating system in late 2012. At the time, it seemed like it was going to be a great competitor to the iPad and I bought a Surface RT on the second day of its availability. It was slow at first, but software updates improved the situation significantly, and it has been fairly usable for a long time.
Approaching the two-year anniversary of the release of Windows RT, the platform has had a somewhat sordid life. When "Windows on ARM" was first announced, it was shown off in the form of a port of Windows 7 and Office 2010 to some phone or tablet hardware in a special rack-mount configuration, likely some kind of testing board. Printers and other devices were shown to work with it (and, they do, I'm not going to hold that against it) and it was positioned, at least at that phase, as fully fledged Windows. "Windows on ARM" was to be for "PCs" at that phase.
Unfortunately, in the real world, Windows RT has barely enjoyed success. There were only a handful of RT devices ever announced, not all of those ever got released in the United States, and nobody outside of Microsoft and Nokia ever built anything for the "second wave" of Windows RT devices. Add to that, most of the RT devices were a lot more expensive than Atom-based netbooks and ultra-cheap AMD laptops at the time, and what could have been the marquee Windows RT device, the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 (RT) was nearly a $850 product new, and (at least from my perspective) has some physical problems, such as a substandard keyboard, and the fact that the chassis is overly large, both for a 11.6-inch machine and in comparison to the Microsoft Surface RT. That twelve hours of battery life is downright amazing, though.
Part of the promise of Windows RT was that Microsoft was going to be creating a competitor against iOS and Android in the touch-centric, highly mobile tablet ecosystem. The aspect of it that drew me in was that there was this device with tablet-like portability and battery life, an excellent tablet-like display running a tablet-focused operating system, and it also features a keyboard that attached easily, and the Windows desktop and Microsoft Office is on it, making the Surface RT the physical embodiment of Microsoft's original promise of Windows 8 as a no-compromise dual-mode operating system.
In fact, from the start, even though the Surface RT (and other RT devices) were actually very expensive for tablets, with iPad-adjacent pricing, I always saw them as a good deal because for your $499 you got a copy of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (later expanded to include Outlook), and a whole computer to go with it. (Let's not forget that twenty years ago, $499 bought you Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and nothing else.)
The challenge is that despite having all of the makings of a "PC," nobody wanted to treat it like a fully-fledged computer. Outlook for the desktop eventually shipped for the platform, but Windows RT lacks management functionality found in Windows 8 Pro and Microsoft has, for two years now, shown a strong unwillingness to allow third party desktop applications on the platform. In fact, Microsoft has ported plenty of games to the new interface, but they have yet to take a leadership role in bringing any productivity applications to their own tablet platform's interface.)
Some of this makes sense, because it's supposed to be Microsoft's entry into what a lot of people see as a consumer oriented, "content consumption" space, but Microsoft has always touted the Surface's prowess as a content creation machine, and from day one, had framed the Surface's keyboard accessories as the physical components of the most productive tablet platform around. This was even the Surface RT with its alternative hardware and limited choice in applications.
The Microsoft Surface family is the physical manifestation of Windows 8, and in part, these are Windows 8's initial problems: It promised a no-compromise experience in the "metro" interface, for simple tablet-style operations, as well as in the desktop department, for power users and users of highly complicated desktop software.
The problem was that in its initial 2012 release, Windows 8 didn't allow you to actually control everything about your computer using Metro applications or settings, nor did the desktop environment feel (to many) like it was really a first-class citizen on the platform. Visually, it feels trapped within the "metro" interface, as though everything you'll ever do on your computer now only counts for one "app" in a new interface.
I don't know how much I buy that theory, because that's exactly what we did to the command line when graphical interfaces became standard, but nevertheless, the mix of desktop-to-tablet interfaces and controlling what experience you "get" on Windows has been something Microsoft has been updating over the years.
The recent announcement of Windows 10 shows that Microsoft is definitely taking hints from the marketplace (and tech bloggers) and attempting to update their strategies and products as time goes on, and with major yearly releases of Windows, this has been working out well for them. The biggest question I have about Windows 10 is what the future of Windows RT and the concept of "Windows on ARM" in general is.
Windows 10 has the appearance of trying to reconcile the "keyboards and mice vs. touch-screens" issue by determining what kind of computer you have and then trying very hard to make you use the best kind of interface for that particular type of computer. The problem is, as I've said before, I'm using my Surface RT as though it were a tiny desktop computer, so this will naturally be the "wrong" choice for me. However, if things continue along the same path of being as configurable as they have always been, it is likely that you'll be able to choose the desktop Windows 10 interface on a Surface RT.
On the other hand, there has been at least one suggestion online that "Windows RT" and "Windows Phone" are going to be rolled into a single product SKU and that the purpose of Windows RT tablets will be much closer to that of iPads and Android phones: run phone applications on a bigger screen.
The complication that this brings up is that unless Microsoft encourages a (or builds their own) next generation of ARM-based Windows tablets, the entire tablet-only Windows RT ecosystem will exist solely for the benefit of a now-discontinued set of devices whose owners may not even want that type of tablet experience, given that something influenced them to buy a tablet with a full USB port, a desktop file manager, and a copy of Office.
So, if I had to say that I had a preference for the future of Windows 10 for RT devices, it would be that it stays the course offering a full or nearly full port of Windows to ARM-based PCs. A big challenge for somebody who is just a user of the platform is detecting whether this is actually how people use their RT devices, or if this is just my particular instance of spacebar heating.
Presuming Windows 10 continues down this path, my ideal Windows RT device probably either continues along on the same form factor, or gains the new larger 12-inch form factor of the Surface Pro 3, has the Pro 3's new nTrig pen, and uses an nVidia Tegra K1 SoC processor, ideally the thing would have 3 or 4 gigabytes of memory, and up to a 128GB storage device. Of course, I would also like for there to be two USB ports on the Surface, and a full sized SD card slot would be great.
I've long wanted Windows RT to show up on more types of computers. With support for Ethernet, I would buy an RTbox almost instantly and I've also described an idea for a 21.5-inch all-in-one system running Windows RT as a stand-in for a simple work desktop or as a thin client. I would also buy a small ruggedized laptop with a large amount of battery life (something like a Dell Latitude 2100 or Lenovo ThinkPad X140e) but running Windows RT.
I think that RT's biggest challenge in gaining any new markets has been involved with a few things. Firstly, Windows RT (at least on the original Surface RT) has a very low memory ceiling and is pretty slow. Even if you can do all of your day's work in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, which are the primary ("only") desktop applications on the system, you can't really do very much of that work at once because all RT devices currently have 2 gigs of memory. After that, there is the challenge that a few other applications coming to the platform might help. I am often caught saying that PuTTY and Notepad++ are all I'd need to make the system that much more useful, but I think part of my frustration is with the way that Windows RT combines managing the resources you're using with tablet-style killing of background applications you "aren't using."
The most obvious path forward is a tablet based on a Bay Trail Atom/Pentium/Celeron or a Core M CPU, but if it's possible, I think it's important to give Intel a competitor in the Windows market. In addition, if Windows RT itself had some more applications or if there were an "expert" unlock mode, I think that Windows RT would gain more value as the "Chrome OS" of the Windows world.
Many compare ChromeBooks to the new Very Inexpensive Windows Computers using x86 platforms, and those machines definitely hit the price point, but they're still susceptible to traditional Windows security problems – the kind of thing Windows RT can avoid completely, both because it's completely locked down, and because it's not using an Intel processor. (Not that this gives RT devices a free pass online, just that they do have a better chance than a regular x86 Windows PC.)
At the end of the day, I wouldn't avoid buying a "Surface 3" that was based on an Intel platform, but I will say I wish Microsoft had handled the entire RT platform a bit better. It seems, for example, as though Windows RT with some better management tools (say, if Windows RT allowed management via group policies in an Active Directory domain and discovery and configuration via a System Center Configuration Manager system, that it may have been well liked by enterprises.
Another thing to consider is that Microsoft had a Surface Mini in the works. Such a device was all but officially announced and on store shelves, and was essentially a dedicated, physical, OneNote notebook. The device was canceled on the eve of the Surface Pro 3 launch, however, likely due to the fact that it was almost certainly going to be a premium device with a relatively limited set of use cases and limited market appeal, due to its high price and low specifications.
This introduces the possibility that as of this writing (which is a few weeks before this publishing) Microsoft will never follow up on the Surface RT and Surface 2. Despite the fact that the Surface family tends to cost more than equivalent tablets in the marketplace, I would buy one because I feel like Microsoft has created both the best physical representation of the Windows operating system and a very good tablet. It would be a shame if they didn't, but I suppose we'll find out in due time. I'd like to think Microsoft wouldn't leave its ecosystem without a good mid-sized tablet, but I simply can't say for sure they wouldn't.