• New generation of modern PCs, connected devices and IoT solutions are fuelling innovative experiences and business transformation
On wednesday 29th May, Microsoft discussed how new modern Windows PCs, connected devices and IoT services and programs at Computex 2019. “We continue to work closely with our partners to deliver intelligent edge solutions that enhance work and life experiences. The breadth of new PCs, IoT devices and IoT solutions on display at Computex, along with future ecosystem innovations will drive growth and business transformation for partners and customers,” said Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft
Partners are Delivering Modern PC Experiences
Partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI have recently announced new modern PCs that will delight both creators and gamers.
Some of the highlights include :
Acer’s ConceptD 9 creator notebook features a 4K UHD IPS PANTONE Validated display. Colors are as accurate as possible as the display covers 100 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut. This creator notebook stays quiet with Acer’s 4th generation AeroBlade 3D Fan with a noise reduction mechanism that emits less than 40 db of noise — equivalent to the sound level of a library — while maintaining high computing and graphics performance.
The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo (UX581) is an ultraportable laptop that includes a 4K OLED UHD ASUS ScreenPad Plus (3840 x 2160), a full-width secondary touchscreen (3840 x 1100) that expands and enhances the interactive capabilities of the original ASUS ScreenPad. The display is a frameless four-sided ASUS NanoEdge design, with ultra slim bezels for immersive visuals.
The new Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 packs more performance in a thinner design and larger display. Dell’s first laptop with Intel’s Ice Lake-U 10nm 10th gen processors and features adaptive performance based on the latest Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology, which proactively changes the power of the CPU according to the performance of the workload. It comes with a redesigned thermal system to cool the higher performing processor, while creating an overall 8% thinner 2-in-1 than the previous generation.
HP OMEN X 2S is the world’s first dual-screen gaming laptop[2], allowing player to chat, browse for their perfect songs to accompany their gaming sessions, watch Twitch or YouTube, or even serve as a hub for OMEN Command Center software through an easy-to-use 6-inch 1080p touchscreen above the keyboard – freeing them from the hassles of alt-tabbing. The laptop also features a real-time screen mirroring feature that enhances the gaming experience, by cutting and magnifying parts of the main screen – such as copying the map portion of a racing game – to a second screen, ensuring centered vision and more vertical head movement.
The new Lenovo ThinkPad T495 offers feature upgrades without compromise, and provides a high level of hardware security and manageability. It features a longer battery life, and increased performance by up to 18 percent (compared to benchmarks of prior generations). Lenovo is also delivering greater peace of mind with just a slide of the ThinkShutter, an all-in-one integrated camera security cover that physically protects ThinkPad users from malicious webcam snoopers.
Featuring the latest RTX graphics and 9th Generation Intel Core i9 processor and Wi-Fi 6, the new MSI GE65 Raider can easily handle demanding AAA game titles. Its ultra-fast 240Hz IPS-level thin bezel display ensures sharp and clear images in a compact form factor, and the new two-toned mesh design at the underside of the unit, inspired by a dragon theme, provides better ventilation and prevents hot air from recirculating.
These new modern PCs from ecosystem partners require a modern operating system that enables foundational experiences customers already expect from their devices, including seamless updates, security that protects users from malicious attacks, anywhere connectivity with 5G, LTE and Wi-Fi that is consistent and reliable over time. Beyond that, the modern OS must deliver innovative new human centric experiences including cloud connectivity that enables seamless access to data and compute power, rich AI powered applications and experiences, multi-sense capabilities – people can interact using touch, pen, voice, mouse and keyboard – and the right sensor support and posture awareness to enable a breadth of new form factors and applications.
“Microsoft is investing to enable modern OS experiences that take advantage of silicon advancements, powerful PCs, the cloud and the power of AI. Some of these innovations, including Asian Inking platform, cognitive recognition services that help with photo tagging, as well as the new Your Phone capabilities that lets users mirror their Android phone screen on their PC, are new innovations users can expect in the coming months,” said Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft.
Powering Intelligent Edge and Internet of Things (IoT)
At Computex, Microsoft also shared new services and programs that hardware manufacturers can leverage to get their devices connected and included in IoT solutions:
- IoT Plug and Play is a new open modelling language to connect IoT devices to the cloud seamlessly, helping device partners to deploy IoT solutions at scale. This provides partners a straightforward way to model the capabilities and data coming from their IoT devices and will provide customers with a large portfolio of partner-certified devices that can easily be made to work with any IoT solution, often without writing any new code.
- Microsoft Azure IoT Device Agent V2 for Windows 10 IoT lets operators configure, monitor and manage their devices remotely from their Azure dashboard. It provides an open-source, ready to build package that creates and manages the Azure IoT Hub identities on the device, manages the cloud connection and its renewal, provides a plug-in model for platform components, which allows easy onboarding to various Azure services, including discovery, initialization, error reporting and state aggregation. It also comes with a set of ready-to-ship plug-ins for commonly used platform components and leverages Azure IoT Module twin so a separate UWP app is not required to connect to Azure IoT Hub.
- Azure IoT Central is a fully managed global IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale. New custom dashboard features allow partners to bring their own brand and user experience to their IoT solution, and benefit from the built-in security, reliability, device connectivity and role-based user account management provided by IoT Central.
Partners such as Techsun and Advantech are implementing IoT solutions built on Microsoft’s comprehensive, trusted and easy-to-use edge to cloud platforms to embrace business model transformation and accelerate time to value for customers.
“At Microsoft our goal is to simplify IoT – from the cloud down to the smallest microcontroller (MCU) based devices, and we do this by meeting our partners and customers where they are, with the right intelligent cloud services, software and dev tools, to get devices connected, and manage their solutions at scale,” Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft.
Photo Caption : (Left to right: Nick Parker, CVP of Consumer and Device Sales, Roanne Sones, CVP of OS Platforms, Rodney Clark, VP of IoT Sales, on stage at Computex 2019 in Taipei, “Enabling Innovation and Opportunity on the Intelligent Edge”)
