Word on the street has it that Microsoft is getting ready to unveil its next-generation Surface Pro tablet very soon. Dubbed the Surface Pro 4, the device is being billed as the successor to Microsoft's well-received Surface Pro 3 and will likely share plenty of the same features, although upgraded, as the predecessor.
While Microsoft has yet to officially announce the Surface Pro 4, the rumor mill has long been churning out all kinds of rumors about what the device could be like. There's never a hard truth to any rumor, but some rumors are more credible than others, and we've done the job of rounding out which ones are the most believable to create a working picture of what the Surface Pro 4 could offer.
Design and Display
Let's start with what the eye can see. The Surface Pro 4 is not likely going to look extremely different from the Surface Pro 3, as Microsoft's director of marketing for its Surface line of products Brian Hall says in a blog post that the accessories for the Surface Pro 3 were designed "with our product roadmap in mind and will be compatible with the next generation of the Pro line of Surface." Hall is referring to the Type Cover, the docking station and other accessories including the power adapter and Ethernet adapter.
However, according to Design & Trend, Microsoft could be planning to unveil two variants of the Surface Pro 4, one with a 12-inch display and another with a 14-inch display. Both tablets are likely to have the same 2K resolution of the Surface Pro 3 at 2,160 x 1,440 pixels.
Processor
The Surface Pro 4 is widely regarded as being powered by the new Skylake processors unveiled by Intel at the IFA 2015. The new chipsets are said to be more powerful and more efficient than the fifth-generation processors running on Intel's Broadwell architecture, and the Surface Pro 4 is expected to benefit a lot from using the new chips.
There will reportedly be different variants running on Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 iterations, says Business News Daily, a report which has been seconded by Tom Warren, resident Microsoft expert of The Verge, in a tweet that assures future users that the tablet will definitely not run on the low-end Core M chips.
New Stylus
Business News Daily reports that the Surface Pro 4 will get an upgraded N-Trig stylus that is more touch-sensitive than previous iterations. Also, pairing the stylus with Windows 10 will give it much more functionality, For example, the stylus will let users annotate web pages more easily before saving them on the cloud. Microsoft's improved text-recognition technology will also reportedly make turning written texts into digital notes much easier.
Pricing
The 12-inch Surface Pro 4 is expected to launch along the same price points as its predecessor, which was $800 when it was first unveiled. Meanwhile, the bigger 14-inch tablet should cost more, with an additional $100 or $150 to the price tag.
Release Date
Microsoft has no product cycle for its Surface Pro tablet line, but the upcoming device will reportedly make its first public appearance sometime in October. The Verge's Warren, among others, confirms this to be true, so it's very likely that we don't have to wait for so long before the Surface Pro 4 finally launches.
Photo: Sinchen Lin | Flickr
