Definitely more convenient than hunting down a power outlet while holding a latte, Starbucks and Duracell are testing wireless charging at retail stores.

Detailed on Boston.com earlier today, the Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks is launching a pilot program that will install wireless charging stations at seventeen franchise locations around the city of Boston. Partnering with Duracell, Starbucks management is utilizing inductive charging technology and installing large Duracell Powermats within the tables at retail stores. In order to take advantage of wireless charging, customers will either need to purchase a Power Matters Alliance (PMA) compatible wireless power case or borrow a loaner case from a Starbucks employee. Duracell currently makes PMA-compatible cases for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S as well as the Samsung Galaxy S III Android smartphone.

When asked about the new technology rolling out at Boston locations, Starbucks chief digital officer Adam Brotman stated “We’re building the Powermat technology into some of the tabletops, just to get a sense for how our customers will react, compared to having to plug their mobile devices into the wall. A few weeks into the test, we’ll do some in-store giveaways, and we will have some behind the counter available to loan out.” 

Starbucks plans to roll out a minimum of eight Powermats per store in order to gauge customer demand and the first stores to receive the upgrades are located within Boston’s financial district. As more people start using the wireless charging stations instead of the power outlets within each store, it’s likely that it will free up charging space for customers with laptops or other devices.

AT&T has also started to sell PMA-compatible cases and Delta airlines has started installing wireless charging spots around gates at major airports within the United States. Earlier this year, General Motors announced that the company would be adding a PMA-compatible powermat station into Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Buick automobiles. In addition, popular venue Madison Square Gardens in New York City has added hundreds of wireless charging locations as a service to visitors.  

Apple unveiled a new high-performance Fusion Drive; but is it a step forward for storage, or simply a high-priced rebranding of something that already exists?

When Apple announced its updated iMac and Mac mini desktop computer models last week, it also took the wraps off a new storage technology called a Fusion Drive. The Fusion Drive is supposed to combine the high performance and low power requirements of a flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) with the sheer storage capacity of a traditional hard drive — but implemented so users never need worry about what data and applications happen to be on each kind of storage.

Is the Fusion Drive a genuine step forward in computer storage, or is it just a slick rebranding of so-called hybrid drives that’ve been combining SSD and traditional hard drive technologies in notebooks for a couple years?

What is the Fusion Drive?

As announced last week, Apple’s Fusion Drive essentially combines a 128GB flash-based SSD drive with either a 1TB or 3TB 3.5-inch traditional hard drive. Although this combination is a new drive configuration from Apple, it’s not unprecedented in the PC industry. For several years, PCs have been available with multiple drives, and it’s been pretty common for high-end notebook and desktop users to opt for machines that have a small SSD for their operating system and key apps that require high speed access but large-capacity hard drives for things like photos, movies, video, and music.

However, Apple has taken the idea one step further. Those PCs with both an SSD and standard hard drive treat those drives as separate devices. For Windows users, the SSD is typically the C: drive, and the traditional hard drives (or their partitions) appear as separate drive letters. Apple is taking a different approach with OS X Mountain Lion. The SSD drive and the hard disk that comprise the Fusion Drive appear as a single logical volume. So far as the user is concerned, there’s just one hard drive, and they never have to worry about distinguishing between the computer’s flash-based storage and hard drive storage.

The intelligence to manage the flash and hard drive storage is built into OS X Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion will automatically keep the operating system and a user’s key applications in the flash portion of the Fusion drive for best performance. Apple notes that the entire OS X operating system and all the apps that ship with it will fit into the 128GB of flash storage with room to spare. However, the prioritization doesn’t stop there. Mountain Lion keeps tabs on applications and data most frequently accessed by the user (often called “hot” data), and prioritizes it for storage on flash media. Less frequently-used (or never-used) data gets shuffled off to the hard drive for long term storage. The result is that users never have to worry about how to manage data across the two storage mediums. “It just works,” noted Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, at Apple’s keynote last week.

Isn’t a Fusion Drive the same as a hybrid drive?

Apple’s Fusion Drive sounds like a so-called “hybrid drive,” which aim to boost the performance of traditional hard drives by building in some additional flash-based storage. The best-known hybrid drives are the Momentus XT line, intended for notebook computers; but there are also products like the PCI-based RevoDrives from OCZ Technologies that are aimed towards the desktop markets.

Apple’s Fusion Drive differs from hybrid drives in two primary ways. First, Apple is using more flash storage by packing 128GB of flash, an amount which will likely increase as Apple revises and upgrades the offering. Conversely, Seagate’s Momentus XT drives only incorporate 4GB to 8GB of flash storage. OCZ’s RevoDrive line is more directly comparable to the Fusion Drive — it packs 100GB of flash storage.

Second, and more importantly, hybrid drives use their flash storage merely as cache. All hard drives pack a bit of RAM memory to speed up read and write operations; it’s not unusual these days for hard drives to pack 8MB to 32MB of RAM to boost performance. Hybrid drives essentially just treat their built-in flash storage as an extension of this cache. The most recently-accessed “hottest” data is stored in flash first, essentially on its way to and from the hard drive without much (or any) consideration for the nature of that data. Conversely, Apple prioritizes the use of flash storage to things like files, programs, and data that are most likely to boost performance — and the user never needs to worry about managing it.

Another distinction is that Apple isn’t making Fusion Drives available in its notebook line where systems like the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros rely solely on non-upgradable, soldered-on RAM and flash storage. The Fusion Drives are desktop-only.

How the Fusion Drive will work in Macs

The Fusion Drives are brand new, so we don’t have much information on how they will work. However, Apple has posted a Knowledge Base article that clarifies a few things.

First, Fusion Drives have to be pre-installed in a Mac. You can’t get an iMac or a Mac mini with an SSD drive, attach an external hard drive via Thunderbolt or Firewire, then use Disk Utility or another program to have the Mac treat the combination as a Fusion Drive. Inside the Mac, the Fusion Drive will exist as two physically separate storage devices, but users won’t be able to roll their own Fusion Drives using off-the-shelf pieces.

However, if users so desire, they will be able to partition off part of a Fusion Drive’s hard disk as a separate volume. This can be very handy to creative professionals and other people who tend to work on large sets of data (say, raw video or an immense image set), and then archive off the project when they’re done. With a separate partition, the workspace can be wiped out and reformatted in one simple step, and users dont’ have to worry about fragmentation and other issues impacting performance down the road. However, the Fusion Drive is limited to just one of these extra partitions, and that partition doesn’t get any performance boost from the flash portion of the Fusion Drive.

How much of a performance boost can users expect? Apple characterizes performance of flash-based storage as about 3.5 times faster than a traditional hard drive. According to Apple, desktop Macs equipped with a Fusion Drive will boot twice as fast as a hard drive-equipped model, perform tasks like importing photos into Aperture as much as 3.6 times faster than a traditional hard drive, and copy files 3.7 times faster. However, Apple does note that users might experience hiccups if they over-run the Fusion Drive’s flash storage — including dropped frames during massive video imports, for example.

Downsides of the Fusion Drive

So are there downsides to Fusion Drives? As with all storage technologies, they do have their compromises.

Windows — Users who dual-boot their Macs between Mac OS X and a version of Windows using Boot Camp will be pleased to know they can create a separate partition on a Fusion Drive, and use that partition for Boot Camp. There are a couple gotchas, though. That’s only supported on the 1TB Fusion Drives for now, and the Windows partition won’t get any performance boost from the flash portion of the Fusion Drive. Remember: the brains behind the operation are baked into OS X Mountain Lion, not the drives themselves.

Access from other systems — Fusion Drives can be shared over a network just like any other logical volume. What’s more, they can be mounted directly on another system using Target Disk mode — but only so long as the other system is running OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 or later. Previous versions of Mountain Lion (or Lion, or Snow Leopard, etc.) don’t know how to deal with Fusion Drives.

Maintenance and troubleshooting — Apple does offer a special version of Disk Utility with Mountain Lion that can handle Fusion Drives available in the Internet version of Mountain Lion Recovery. So, if a Fusion Drive has problems, users aren’t totally out of luck. However, third-party disk repair utilities, like Alsoft’s DiskWarrior, will need to be updated to handle Fusion Drives.

Upgrades or third-party Fusion Drives? — Although Fusion Drives seem to rely on more-or-less standard SSD sticks and 3.5-inch hard drives, there’s no word yet on whether either of those components can be upgraded and still keep a Mac’s “Fusion Drive” capabilities. Hitachi already makes 4TB 3.5-inch hard drives, and drive makers are continuing to push the limits of storage technology. No one is going to be surprised if 6TB 3.5-inch drives are available in a few years. Or maybe you want to boost your Mac’s performance even further from 128GB of flash to 256GB or more — can it be done? (That is, assuming you have the technical chops to get inside Apple’s new desktop systems.) Nobody knows yet…but don’t be surprised if the answer is no.

Similarly, we don’t know yet if anyone else will be allowed to make Fusion Drives. In theory, the new Macs’ Thunderbolt port has more than enough bandwidth to boot and see significant performance increases when used with a hypothetical external Fusion Drive — but don’t expect Apple to offer one. There’s also no indication yet if Mac storage vendors like La Cie will be able to offer external Fusion Drive solutions.

Cost — Finally, Fusion Drives aren’t cheap. Although Apple’s new iMacs won’t be available until next month, configuration information for the new Mac mini indicates a 1TB is a $250 upcharge from a standard 1TB drive running at 5,400 rpm. That’s kinda pricey since 128GB SSDs currently range from about $100 to $175. Apple is charging a premium for the Fusion Drive — and right now, it doesn’t look like there’s any other way to get one. It’s a bit reminiscent of the outrageous prices Apple charges for RAM: 8GB of RAM for a Mac mini is $100 from Apple — more than twice what third-party vendors charge for the same upgrade.

Bottom line

All in all, it’s very tempting to describe Apple’s Fusion Drive as what hybrid drives should have been all along. Sure, people have been packin both SSDs and traditional hard drives into their computers for a few years and getting substantial performance benefits. But there’s always been an unfortunate and awkward overhead of having to manually manage what applications and data are on which drives, and many SSD drives designed to improve startup times are as small as 20GB — barely enough to hold an operating system, let alone a user’s critical apps and files. With the Fusion Drive, Apple includes enough SSD storage for meaningful performance benefits with even demanding apps and data — and takes the headaches out of managing the separate storage media. In a few years, we may find ourselves wondering why we ever managed SSD and hard drive storage any other way.

We go hands on with Microsoft's latest Windows Phone operating system for the first time, and it appears like Windows Phone 8 may have some fight in it.

Windows Phone’s journey began long ago, in 2010. Back then, BlackBerry was still a viable brand and Palm was alive. It appeared like Microsoft was about to reverse its fortunes in the smartphone space. Two years later, it’s still battling for single digit market share in a smartphone market absolutely dominated by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating system. With Windows 8 launching, Windows Phone 8 could be Microsoft’s big chance to turn things around.

Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8 earlier this year, but today, it showed off several new features: Wallet, Kids Corner, Camera Lenses, an amped up People Hub, and Data Sense. What are all these fancily-named features, you ask? Let’s dig in.

The new phones

Microsoft has kept a tight lid on what parts of the OS we were allowed to see and what we weren’t up to this point, but today, the veil came off. Samsung, HTC, and Nokia each showed off their WP8 devices. Seeing the entire lineup together was quite impressive. This is undoubtedly Microsoft’s most varied and well-supported Windows Phone launch to date. For the first time, Microsoft has given manufacturers a lot more leeway to create handsets with more varied specs, features, and designs. These handsets offer a variety of screen sizes, resolutions, shapes, processing power, and unique features. While Nokia handsets boasted a suite of Nokia transportation apps, HTC is heavily pushing its ImageSense camera and Beats functionality. Samsung has plenty of unique apps and is stressing the connectivity between its Windows Phones and Windows 8 tablets. Phones also now seem to come in every color of the rainbow. The hands-on area resembled a Skittles commercial. Some phones even feature swappable shells, so you can change your color every day.

Kids Corner

Now that the smartphone industry is maturing, it’s beginning to get more family friendly. Today, I got to try out Microsoft’s new Kids Corner feature: a sandboxed custom homescreen you can create just for your kids to play around in. For the tech-savvy parent, I have to say, this could be a killer feature.

Kids are annoying sometimes. They won’t shut up and they’re hyper as hell. But what if you could hand them your phone without worrying whether they’ll email your boss pictures of Barney? Now you can. WP8 lets you assign whatever apps, games, music, videos, or other content you want your kids to be able to access to a special homescreen. Turning the feature on requires you to dig into the Settings menu a little, but once it’s activated, you can hand your child your phone at its lock screen. All they have to do is swipe to the left to open a custom kid-friendly homescreen. They can move all the Live Tiles around however they please, and the Home button is deactivated, so you don’t have to worry about them escaping back into your content. A word of advice, though: Create a password for your lock screen. If you don’t, then your kids can still restart the screen and poof, they’re back in your email. 

Data Sense

Microsoft has followed Google’s lead and integrated a data-monitoring feature in Windows Phone 8. Data Sense lets you set a data limit for the month (or another length of time) and will warn you as you pass thresholds like 50 percent of your data. Better, you can dig into exactly what apps are sucking up all of your data. I can’t believe that the iPhone doesn’t yet have a feature like this, but now every other major OS does. There isn’t a ton of depth to this app, but it’s value can be measured by the size of your phone bill.

Rooms for your people

Windows Phone has long pushed “hubs” as a way to aggregate large numbers of apps and features around certain topics. The People hub has been a good place to find your contacts and see recent social-networking status updates, but now it can do a little more. If you happen to have a group of friends who have climbed aboard the Windows Phone train like yourself, you can invite them into a “Room” with you. Rooms are kind of like Facebook used to be: exclusive. They have to approve you, but once you’re all connected, you can share content pretty easily.

I haven’t made my own group yet, but I did check out some pre-made groups. By swiping through pages, you can connect with your friends in a few different, useful ways. There’s an open, ongoing chat window, a shared calendar (which can connect to iPhone and some Android devices via a Web link), and photo sharing. It seems like a really great way for close friends to stay in touch. Hopefully Microsoft will continue to build on this feature.

Camera ‘lenses’

This feature doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of notoriety, but for fans of photo filters and apps, it’s pretty cool. While Instagram still isn’t on Windows Phone, there are a lot of cool apps that let you add effects to photographs and now Microsoft lets you access them directly from the Camera app. In essence, it’s now a Camera Hub. You can access these apps by just tapping one of the icons on the screen. Its easy and brings up a grid of apps. Press one and you can apply its feature or filter. Very cool. 

Better Live Tiles

Finally, I still haven’t gotten over how much nicer and more customizable the Windows Phone 8 homescreen looks. Because Microsoft is now allowing even more minute features and pages to be “pinned” to the Start screen, the variety of content is impressive. Every Windows Phone I saw today had a completely different and sometimes startlingly unique look to it — a few of them were so busy that I didn’t know where to start. Microsoft has always said that the Start screen reflects who is using the phone. For the first time, I think that’s true. Live Tiles can now be resized to take up an entire row, a standard square, or 1/4 square (practically an icon). You can do a lot with the Start screen now. Apps can communicate with their Live Tiles (and you) faster and better now too. You can even allow apps to show you information on your unlock screen, if you’re into that.

It’s looking good

Windows Phone has always been a nice-looking operating system, but with WP8, Microsoft seems to be smoothing out some of the gaps in its functionality and introducing more features that are unique to its platform. iOS and Android seem to chase and copy one another these days, but Microsoft continues to do its own thing. Now that Windows Phones like the HTC 8X will be on T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon this holiday season, there’s little reason not to at least check one out. You may like it. I’m may make the jump myself, if I’m able.

Hoping to buy Assassin's Creed III, but unwilling to devote hours of your time unlocking the game's features? A series of newly revealed DLC packs seemingly suggest that Ubisoft has got you covered.

As far as most modern gaming publishers are concerned, there are two major ways to monetize a big-budget game: Either the company can rely entirely on revenue generated by a game’s $60 retail price tag, or it can drastically cut that price (often to nothing at all) and generated profit purely by convincing players to drop small sums of money on items and goods useful within the game itself. These piecemeal purchases are commonly known as “microtransactions,” and while they offer a viable alternative to the traditional retail model, they aren’t quite the holy grail of fiscal security. Instead, that would be a scheme in which a publisher offers a big-name game for the standard $60 price point, but also offers players small microtransactions designed to keep revenue flowing over the life of the game.

Ubisoft, the publisher behind the imminent Assassin’s Creed III has long been one of the key proponents of this idea. “There will be free-to-play on consoles,” said Ubisoft CFO Alain Martinez in the company’s September conference call with investors. “But in the future, with games like Watch Dogs, we could see more opportunity for $60 games to learn from the free-to-play model. The next generation will offer more and more item-based content. This will benefit our games’ profitability.”

With that in mind, it’s interesting that this morning a new quintet of downloadable content offerings for Assassin’s Creed III was revealed by Worthplaying. Each of the five packs, which are said to be available for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 iterations of the game, offers players access to a set amount of “Erudito,” a special in-game currency that can be redeemed “to acquire some game items, disregarding your current level.” Those who opt to spend $1 of real-world cash will receive 20 Erudito, $2 will get you 50, and so on until you reach the $20 pinnacle which grants players access to 925 Erudito. 

Unfortunately missing from any of this is a solid description of what exactly players can buy with their Erudito. Our review of Assassin’s Creed III is still in lock down thanks to Ubisoft’s non-disclosure agreement (it should go live on Tuesday, October 30 at 9AM PST), but when asked how this faux cash might be used in-game our reviewer seemed puzzled and couldn’t imagine how such a microtransaction scheme might work given the gameplay elements and content currently found in Ubisoft’s latest adventure. Though we reached out to Ubisoft representatives for clarification on this matter, they were only able to tell us that more information will be coming in the future, so it appears we’ll have to wait for more word on what exactly Erudito is, both in relation to Assassin’s Creed III and as a precedent for the company’s future publishing plans.

For a long time now, we’ve been talking about the possibility of LG making a new Nexus device. With tons of leaked photos and other information, there was no denying it. We all expected to hear official word of the new smartphone today– until we found out that Hurricane Sandy resulted in Google canceling the event. Good news, Google decided not to let this get in the way and unveiled the Nexus 4 through their blog instead.

The Nexus 4 is basically everything we thought it would be. It runs on Android 4.2 and includes no 4G LTE. The specs are still pretty impressive– if you can live without ultra-fast mobile broadband — with its 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro and 2GB of RAM. Other features include 8 or 16GB storage options, 8MP rear cam, 1.3MP front cam, a 2100 mAh Li-Polymer battery, NFC and wireless charging support.

Probably the biggest appeal with the new smartphone is its extremely budget-friendly pricing. The LG Nexus 4 is just $299 for an 8GB model and $349 for a 16GB model, that’s unlocked and off-contract starting on November 13th. If you really want it cheaper, T-Mobile will also carry the LG Nexus 4 for $199 on-contract.

What do you think of Google and LG’s new Nexus 4? Excited or not?

Huawei has announced the Honor 2 Android smartphone, a quad-core device that could cost between $300 and $370 if it makes it to US shores. Its predecessor did, so there's a good chance it will do too.

Huawei has recently had more headlines dedicated to it allegedly posing a threat to US national security than its cut price, great spec Android smartphones for which it was once best known. With the announcement of the Honor 2, it could turn this around, provided it sees an international release sometime soon.

News of the Honor 2 seems to have originated from Huawei’s Weibo account, where the phone is named the Glory, a name repeated on the Chinese version of the manufacturers own website, where just to confuse matters it also listed as the “Glory Quad-core Love Shared Exclusive Edition.” Now that’s a memorable name for a smartphone.

So why are we calling it the Honor 2? Well, the original Huawei Glory U8860 was renamed the Honor in the USA and other regions (as well as the Mercury if you grabbed it from Cricket, or the Honour if you live in the UK), and Huawei’s CEO has also referred to the phone under this name, when he hinted at its impending release late last week.

Hopefully that’s cleared up any confusion over the name, so on to the most interesting part — the specification. Inside the Honor 2 is a 1.4GHz, quad-core Hass K3V2 processor of Huawei’s own design, plus 2GB of RAM. The screen measures 4.5-inches and has a 1280 x 720 pixel resolution, providing an excellent 326ppi pixel density.

Android 4.0 is its operating system, and there is also an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video, 8GB of internal memory and a 2230mAh battery that could offer 72 hours of standby. This does make it a little larger than its competitors, as it measures 10.5mm thick and weighs 145 grams. Some may consider this to be a small price to pay for the bigger battery though.

Talking of small prices, there’s confusion over the Honor 2′s possible cost, with Engadget.com saying it will come in at a little over $300 — a bargain if so — while pocketdroid.net says it will be around $370. Whichever turns out to be correct, the Honor 2 will go on sale early next month, and given that the original Glory/Honor made it out of China, there’s a good chance its sequel will do as well.

Verizon has welcomed Windows Phone back into the family with the announcement of the Nokia Lumia 822, an exclusive Windows Phone 8 device set to be released soon.

Verizon has announced the Nokia Lumia 822, a Windows Phone 8 handset exclusive to the network. The news comes a few hours ahead of Microsoft’s big Windows Phone 8 event, which will be held in San Francisco, where the last pieces of information regarding the new OS will be shared.

In the meantime, lets look at the Lumia 822. The screen measures 4.3-inches and hides behind a sheet of protective Gorilla Glass, and although no resolution is mentioned in the press release, it’s likely to be the same as the GSM Lumia 820, which stands at 480 x 800 pixels.

An 8-megapixel camera sits on the rear of the curvy device, complete with Carl Zeiss lens and 1080p video recording, while a 1.2-megapixel video call lens can be found above the screen around the front.

Nokia makes a point to emphasize all the applications it bundles with its Lumia phones, including Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, City Lens and the recently launched Nokia Music. This music streaming service has been out in Europe for a while, and is particularly interesting due to there being no subscription charge and no streamed advertising either.

Other features include NFC, Bluetooth and a choice of black, white or an online exclusive grey color scheme, plus the chance to swap the rear cover for one that enables wireless charging.

The Lumia 822 will connect to Verizon’s 4G LTE network, but aside from all this there is a lack of information on the device’s finer technical points. That won’t stop us hazarding a guess though, as the 822 will probably share the same dual-core, 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal memory as the Lumia 820.

All this is identical to the Lumia 810 too, which is exclusive to T-Mobile USA, while the Lumia 820 can only be found with AT&T. As they share the same spec sheet, the 810, 822 and 820 should really be considered network-exclusive designs, as the differences are all cosmetic.

The Lumia 822 is the first Windows Phone to hit Verizon since last year, when it carried the affordable Lumia 710, and confirms rumors dating back to August of the network’s plans to once again carry handsets running Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Verizon and Nokia have so far committed only to the Lumia 822’s “upcoming availability,” so we’d expect to hear more following Microsoft’s final big reveal later today.

While all around it are busy building cheap 7 and 8-inch tablets, Microsoft says it will stick with 10.1-inch-plus slates for Windows 8 and Windows RT, but keeps quiet on future plans.

It may seem like every other tablet manufacturer is releasing a tablet with a 7-inch, or thereabouts, size screen, however Microsoft isn’t in a rush to follow them. According to Tami Reller, vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Group, all the initial run of tablet computers running Windows 8 will have screen sizes of 10.1-inches or larger.

During an interview with Wired.co.uk, Reller confirmed that Microsoft wouldn’t be offering a 7-inch slate, but didn’t offer any clues on either Microsoft’s partners or its own future plans.

Amazon, Google, Kobo, Samsung, Acer and many others all produce reasonably priced 7-inch tablets running Google Android, while Apple dares to be different with the iPad Mini, which boasts a 7.9-inch display. Tablets with these screen sizes are incredibly popular at the moment.

Microsoft’s new Surface tablets have 10.1-inch screens and are priced to compete with the Apple iPad, rather than the lower-priced Kindle HD and Nexus 7, although a $199 price tag was rumored for a while before the final price was announced. For a new player in the market, is it not a surprise that Microsoft hasn’t chosen to follow the fashion with a smaller Surface tablet to accompany the big screen model?

ZDNet.com’s Mary Jo Foley doesn’t think so, arguing that Windows tablets are made for “both creation and consumption,” and a small screen would make life with Office very difficult indeed. This is backed up by many Windows 8 tablets coming with, or having the option of, a keyboard accessory; something that wouldn’t suit a 7-inch device at all.

Just before the Surface was revealed in June, a rumor regarding a product named the Xbox Surface appeared, where a 7-inch tablet joined what could be the next generation Xbox, suggesting a Wii U-style controller arrangement. Nothing has been heard about this since.

So is that the only way we’ll see a 7-inch Surface tablet? During a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Panos Panay, the general manager of Microsoft’s Surface team was asked if he was considering a smaller, cheaper 7-inch tablet for the future. Instead of a yes or a no, he simply said “keep the suggestions coming.” If Microsoft is planning a small Surface, it’s not going to tell us just yet.