Is there an 85-inch space in the heart (or the wall) of your office? Great news, Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2S has got you covered.
The next, way bigger generation of the TV-sized computer was formally announced on Wednesday at an event in New York City, alongside an upgraded 50-inch Surface Hub 2S. The next iteration of the 50-inch version can be equipped with a rolling stand or wall mount from Steelcase and an APC battery for portability. The Surface Hub 2 was originally previewed last year.
The $8,999 USD (about $12,000 CAD) 50-inch version will be available in the U.S. in June this year, with a 4K resolution and the Surface line’s 3:2 aspect ratio. The 85-inch version is slated for a 2020 release, and it will have a more traditional 16:9 display. Microsoft declined to offer any further pricing info on the bigger version.
Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2S will come to Canada this summer, and more details will follow.
The new Surface Hubs have thinner bezels, a sleeker housing and beefier guts, but perhaps most importantly, it will be upgradeable. While the Surface Hub 2S will ship with an 8th gen i5 processor from Intel, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 128GB SSD, it’s not necessarily committed to those specs.
Using a cartridge system, users will be able to remove the current configuration. It can then be replaced with a Surface Hub 2X “compute module” as its dubbed internally, which includes an upgraded CPU, GPU and memory. The Surface Hub 2X is expected in 2020.
Microsoft sees these touch-enabled panels as the answer for fast-paced and organized team collaboration in the workspace. Bringing together the suite of its business products, like Office 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Whiteboard, the work done on the Surface Hubs will be able to travel with you between any Windows device.
The 50-inch Surface Hub 2S can be equipped with a removable webcam, has Surface Pen support, and an array of speakers and microphones at the front of the device. It will also allow tiling of multiple Surface Hubs in both vertical and horizontal orientations of the display, after the release of the Surface Hub 2X hardware.
Update 04/27/2019: Added comment from Microsoft regarding the Canadian release window.
Source: The Verge, Microsoft
