How would you use the Lumia, Surface and Xbox brands if you were MS?

Would you make Surface the 'stylish' tablet/laptop brand, and Lumia the 'colorful' branding?

Would you make Lumia for phones and laptops only, and have Suface be the hybrid laptop/tablets?

Would you create the much rumored 'Surface Phone'?

Or how about that old 'Xbox Surface' rumor for XBLA only gaming?

I'd keep the Surface brand as one of high prestige and not try to muddle its message by trying to keep with the ipad based off social perception of the product, i.e. not try to replicate the iHerd mindset. People buy PCs to do serious work and serious gaming. An ipad doesn't cut it for either, it's best suited for small children or web browsing in a few tabs. If it were me, I'd keep the Surface tablets as something so when people see it out in the wild, they will say, "Whoa, is that one of those Surface tablets?! That's so cool!"

The Lumia brand... Well, that's interesting. More than anything, the Nokia part of that stays because that's literally a reason why many people in Europe buy one, because it's a Nokia and the connotation that has and the reputation/history it has.

Both brands can be colorful and should be colorful. It's at the point where EVERY damned consumer electronic is black. Maybe white, but overwhelmingly black. That's what is so special about Windows Phone combined with the Nokia Lumia brand, color in both hardware and software. I replaced my old black shell on my 920 to red, WOW!! LOVE IT! Windows Phone red is the best!

Also, I'd make Windows Phone's Start logo as red instead of purple.

Even though Surface's have the colored keyboard covers, to me their black (or black and chrome on surface 2) bodies scream stylish-ness, and high presteige. As though they are the hot items. Surfaces are more like your 'all-in-one' devices where it can be a tablet or a laptop, it can (upon user choice when buying) be WinRT or full Windows.

Lumia tablets, like that one with the red back that I keep seeing seem to scream 'fun' instead. Maybe MS could sell to a completely different group of people by bundling a matching color Lumia phone and Lumia tablet as they compliment each other. Then these people would have a seperate phone and tablet like fashion accessories.

Unless Surface came out with a smaller sized unit, I don't see the point of a 'SurfacePhone', as I think Lumia has the phone market sewed up. I would have said that Lumia retains the 'colorful' phone bodies, and Surface Phones would be the more stylish black/white/chrome bodies for phones, but I believe the next Lumia is also going to have a metal body (that is unless I'm remembering wrong, and I'm refering to the next Galaxy S5 which will have a metal body for the first time, I'm sleepy.)

If MS ever get their stores aligned to the point where it can push my old Xbox Live Arcade Games that I purchased on the Xbox360 to my phone, then I would deffinatley go ahead with 'Suface X' and 'Lumia X' branded phones. To suite different tastes I'd have one include on-screen touch points to represent buttons, and have the other include physical buttons which slide-out simillar to the Sony Xperia Play.


As a side note I would also re-jigg the branding for Windows (RT), Windows (full), and Windows Pro (full). I would drop the RT and just call that windows. I would call full windows Windows Pro. And what is currently Windows Pro with the extra bells and whistles for businesses I would call Windows Business. And then the marketing writes itself. ''This is your laptop/phone/tablet with Windows (show tile interface and windows store). And 'this' is your device with Windows Pro (show tile interface, windows store + backwards compatability with legacy software)'."

I was going to start a new thread, but it's contents is sort-of similar to this one. If a staff member thinks it's own-thread worthy they are welcome to split this post and any replies to it off into another thread...

What do you guys expect, or want, from the 3rd Gen of Surface/Surface Pro devices?

These first three may be more related to the OS...

- I don't want metro updates for some things, and taskbar balloon tips for others. I want a unified notification system.

- Secondly I want 'Windows Update' to handle all manner of updates. Since Windows XP we've been able to add a 'Microsoft Update' component into Windows Update and receive updates for Office, Silverlight and other stuff. I've seen that sometimes we can receive new drivers through WinUpdate, such as display drivers or new wireless card drivers. I want it to handle system component level updates like flashing the bios to a new firmware, or even just taking stock of the software I have installed and telling me there's an update to download and downloading it for me.

- Thirdly I want the time and date square that shows-up as part of the charms bar to be it's own start screen live tile, even if it couldn't be re-sized from being displayed as 'wide'. That thing is just SO EASY to read at a moment's glance.

- For Skype calls, Extra SkyDrive/OneDrive storage and MS Office 2013 promotions from Gen2 to be included in both the Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 devices.

- For 8GB RAM to be an option on the 128GB SSD device.

- 4G included... I think... don't really understand smartphones and their tech as I don't own one so I might be talking out my ass, but I mean that in the event WiFi isn't available we could throw-in a phone's sim or sd card or whatever they are and access the net using 'mobile data'.

- For the Gen 3 keyboards to combine the power cover's extra battery life, and the Type/Touch Cover 2's backlit keys.

- The keyboard, whilst still connected, to detect when it is flipped underneath the kickstand or behind the screen and automatically change to the onscreen keyboard. Thus automatically popping up when we select a text input field so that we don't have to keep pressing the keyboard icon on the taskbar or manually changing the keyboard type in the charms bar.