With the prices of the Microsoft Surface finally having leaked into the wild earlier, it seemed pretty inevitable pre-orders wouldn’t be far behind, and that has wound up being the case today. If you’ve been saving your next tablet purchase until the grand launch of the software maker’s tablet-plus-ultrabook, you’ll be pleased to know that you can now pre-order your very own.
It’s long since been known that only the RT version of the Surface would be immediately available, so anybody looking for the i5 Intel iteration will have to stick around a while longer as Microsoft gets to grips with its very busy schedule. It ships with Windows 8 RT as standard, as well as the Preview of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2013, and although you might presume Office will require further purchase in order to fully unlock, it will actually be upgraded at some point in the near future free of charge.
Those pre-ordering should see their Surface arrive in the mail on the official Windows 8 / Surface launch date of October 26th, which certainly adds a little incentive to secure one right now. In addition, you should also be able to pick up the Slab from Microsoft pop-up holiday stores across the US, as well as, of course, the official Microsoft retail outlets.
It comes in 32 and 64GB configurations, packing in an NVIDIA T30 CPU and 2 GB of RAM. Along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 technology, there are front and rear-facing cameras, full-size USB 2.0 slots, as well as a microSDXC card slot, headset jack, and HD video out port.
Upon announcing the Surface a number of months back, the Redmond company left consumers in limbo by neglecting to reveal the pricing and availability of the slate. That’s all been put to rest, now, and those eager to get their hands on the hybrid can now register their interest by pre-ordering straight from Microsoft.
At time of writing, only the German pre-order page is actually live, although customers residing in the United States will be able to preserve theirs from noon Eastern Time, which is a matter of moments away.
Will you be grabbing an RT version of the Surface? Or are you waiting for the Intel edition with all the bells and whistles?
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