Microsoft unveils Surface Book, 4th gen Surface Pro, new Lumia phones

Microsoft has announced a new Surface Book, a 4th generation Surface Pro tablet, and new Lumia phones.

Microsoft has announced a 4th generation Surface Pro, a new Surface Book, and new Lumia phones in an event in New York overnight.

Its new line-up of Windows 10 devices includes its latest fitness device Microsoft Band 2. It announced three new Windows phones — Lumia 950, Lumia 950XL and Lumia 550.

Microsoft said Windows 10 was now running on 110 million devices world wide, with 8 million being business PCs.

It announced a re-imaged interface for Xbox One, and backward compatibility with Xbox 360 so that users can play their older games on the new device — which has a different type of processor. It also opened applications for app builders to obtain a development version of its upcoming HoloLens augmented reality viewer.

This latest Surface Pro 4 has a large 12.3-inch display, and a thinner and lighter magnesium frame.

Surface Pro 4

Microsoft’s Surface range has ben steadily gaining support since the first edition, which proved a disaster financially but paved the way for longer term acceptance.

This latest Surface Pro 4has a large 12.3-inch display, and a thinner and lighter magnesium frame weighing 766 grams.

It uses recently announced 6th generation Intel processors with a choice of Core M3, i5 and i7 processors, 4, 8 or 16 Gigabytes of memory, and 8 and 5 megapixel cameras. Microsoft has gone with a full sized USB3.0 port rather than USB type-C announced on the 12-inch MacBook and recently, new Google Nexus smartphones.

There’s a choice of four solid state drive capacities: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1 Terabyte, and Microsoft claims up to 9 hours of battery life watching video.

Again, the lower Australian dollar has taken its toll with pricing. In the US, Surface Pro 4 starts at $US899 but Australians will pay starting from $1,349.

The Surface Book screen detaches so it can be used as a clipboard to sketch and take notes.

Surface Book

Microsoft’s Surface Book is a high-end 13.5-inch display detachable laptop costing $2,299 that again uses new Intel 6th generation processors. Microsoft says the screen detaches so it can be used as a clipboard to sketch and take notes.

Users can buy it with on-board graphics or with a discrete graphics processor for performing video editing, fast rendering or immersive gaming.

The Lumia 950 and 950XL are Microsoft’s new large screen phablet phones.

Lumia 950 and 950XL

The Lumia 950 and 950XL are large screen phablet phones with bright AMOLED screen of 5.5-inches and 5.7-inches respectively. Both can be used as a PC with keyboard and mouse when connected to a desktop-sized display, and they have a PureView camera with a big 20 megapixel sensor and triple LED flash.

The Lumia 550 is a smaller LTE phone with a 4.7-inch display and 5 and 2 megapixel cameras. Nokia branding seems to have disappeared with these latest Microsoft Lumia phones.

Battle of the smartphones