Microsoft Surface Hub 2 is an insanely cool 50-inch rotating touchscreen
You'll want it, but will it be yet another piece of conference-room tech no one can figure out?
I could try to describe Microsoft's upcoming Surface Hub 2 -- a scalable, 4K, 50.5-inch touchscreen display, videowall collaboration conferencing system that you can roll around, but I bet you already yawned halfway through that sentence. Just watch the video. I'll wait.
Doesn't it make you want to sneak into the office at night and see what games and movies look like on it? Of course, it will probably be completely unsuitable for entertainment.
This is the second-generation of the Surface Hub, and it looks like it jumped from the 20th to the 21st-century in just three years. Per the blog post Microsoft posted today, it can tile up to four screens in portrait or landscape, rotate them or roll them around on the custom Steelcase stands.
Of course, it was designed with Microsoft apps in mind, including Microsoft Teams , Microsoft Whiteboard, Office 365 and Windows 10 -- it's not clear how other platforms will work beyond simply Skyping in. It has 4K rotating cameras, speakers and the far-field microphone arrays Microsoft has been pushing (for Cortana). The displays use the same 3:2 aspect ratio as the Surface mobile devices.
Multiple users will be able to sign into a shared Surface Hub 2 workspace to collaborate; it's not clear if that's mandatory to call in to it or just a perk.
Everytime I see craveable conference-room technology, though, it makes me think of the 20 minutes (or more) it usually takes to debug basic group conference meetings. Let's hope this is finally a seamless solution.
Select customers will be able to get it this year with a broader rollout in 2019.
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