Two weeks ago, Microsoft held a much talked about Windows 10 event in New York where the company introduced new Surface hardware including an all-in-one Surface Studio PC, a radar haptic input device called the Surface Dial and an updated Surface Book hybrid PC. While the Surface Studio won’t ship until December in the US, the company has announced today that both the Surface Book and the Surface Dial are now available to purchase at Microsoft Stores and select Best Buy locations in the US and Canada.
Microsoft is branding its new Surface Book hybrid as the “Surface Book with Performance Base,” and it starts at $2,399. For this premium price, you get pretty high end specs including an Intel Core i7 processor, an NVIDIA GTX 965M GPU, up to 16GB of RAM, up to 1TB of storage and up to 16 hours of battery life. “No comparable laptop has this much computation power, this many pixels and this much battery life, in this light of a form factor,” claimed Microsoft in its blog post.
As for the Surface Dial, Microsoft has been mostly advertising it as a handy accessory for its creative professionals using its new Surface Studio all-in-one PC, though the $99.99 device should work fine offscreen with any PC running the Windows 10 Anniversary Update as well as as onscreen with the company’s Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book hybrids after an upcoming firmware update. “The Dial integrates with Windows 10 Global Controls & delivers a set of unique experiences such as app-specific, contextually aware toolbars,” explained the company but you’ll probably better understand this product by watching our hands-on video below:
Due to “strong demand,” Microsoft said that the Surface Dial is temporary out of stock on the Microsoft Store but people who pre-order it now will receive it in mid-December. If you want one right now, Best Buy is currently your only option. Sound off in the comments if you plan to buy one of these new Surface products in the coming weeks.
