Samsung Windows 8 developer tablets up for sale on eBay

By Tom Warren, on 19th Sep 11 2:11 pm with 50 Comments

Microsoft handed out 5,000 Samsung Windows 8 developer tablets last week at BUILD. A number of them are now on sale on eBay.

Microsoft’s generous gift to Windows 8 developers last week has been met with some BUILD attendees selling the device on eBay. Microsoft handed out over 5,000 devices to a range of developers at its BUILD conference last week. Developers reacted with cheers and whoops during the Windows 8 keynote on Tuesday as Microsoft unveiled its special developers tablet. The Samsung device is similar to the recently announced Samsung Series 7 Slate device but Within Windows notes that it also includes a number of new and upgraded components:

  • Newer firmware (04WJ.M005.20110826.LDG, 8/26/2011)
  • An Option (GTM67x) chip for WiFi, phone and GPRS connectivity.
  • A Silicon Labs (CP210x) chip for USB<->UART-based scenarios
  • A Trusted Platform Module (1.2)
  • NXP’s Near field Communications chip (NFC)
  • A Bluetooth LE chip
  • A gyroscope
  • An ambient light sensor

One eBay seller has a listing for the device priced at $2,700. Another seller’s listing is priced at $1,225 at the time of writing. It’s not uncommon for such devices to go on sale but could the demand force Microsoft to create their own supply channel similar to Google’s Chrome development laptops?

Samsung Windows 8 developer tablet

Image Credit: eBay

  • Anonymous

    These are still better than the horrific JooJoo tablet I saw on eBay a few days ago (via a tip). That was scary.

  • OMG55

    I guess MS didn’t have any stipulations concerning reselling developer devices?? I hope whoever is selling the device’s trip wasn’t company sponsored, because I believe the company would say the device is their property and action could be taken against the employee.

  • Grannyville7989

    I can’t help but think that this is kind of giving Microsoft’s generosity the middle finger.

    • Anonymous

      I’m a free market capitalist and all, but I can’t help but hate these people.  MS gave out these devices so people could get experience developing for W8.  If you have no intention of doing that, then why did you go to BUILD in the first place?  I would have loved to go to BUILD but ass holes like these signed up causing registration to sell out.  Sorry for being angry, I guess I’m just jealous.

    • cchance

      honestly its microsofts fault, they honestly need to tweak this to be near-commercial (damn fan) and start a development store where developers can buy these legit

    • Mst

      @cchance It’s MS’s fault for giving them the device!!??  Are you freekin’ kidding me?!  We’re these uninterested greedy buttheads FORCED to pick up the device they were generously offered?  And if they didn’t like it, I bet they could find 5-10 developers they know or work with that would love it.  But nooo.. they sell something they got for free!  Ugh.

    • Anonymous

      BUILD is no charity, and it’s not free until they sold it. You need to pay $1700 or something to attend BUILD, plus hotel and flight.

    • Christian Williamson

      600 or 700 if you went as a student i believe

    • http://twitter.com/RobertCFP Robert Wade

      This WAS legit.  It’s just a shame that a few of these “developers” just have one intent and that’s to get a quick buck.  Shallow is as shallow does.  And there’s no way I’m pay two or three thousand for a tablet.  These people are just idiots in my book.  The only bigger idiots are the ones who would buy them off of eBay.

    • Larry

      “they honestly need to tweak this to be near-commercial (damn fan)”

      I read this FAN stuff all over the place and laugh and the stupidity of the comment.  Microsoft does make the hardware, so they have no say.

      Add to that this tablet is a…..PC with a i5 CPU/GPU in it (a low power version).  Samsung or Microsoft cant do anything about the fact that a i5 needs to be cooled.  When you JAM it into this form factor it is even harder to cool.

      Now if an ARM based Winodows 8 tablets have a fan then this would be something to biatch about.

    • Guest

      Well, it will help offset the costs of this person’s conference fees.  They might need the money and were more excited to be there than any of you.  Just a thought.  You sound like a bunch of selfish whiners.  This isn’t the Apple forums, get over it.

    • http://twitter.com/oolong2 oolong2

      Settle down people…. it’s not like this is your grandma knitting you a scarf for your birthday. 

      This is a multinational corporation making a business decision to give away tablets in order to spark development interest in their new product.

      These people spent several thousand dollars going to the conference for whatever reason.  If they want  to sell their tablet then so be it.  Microsoft gives shit out all the time.  This won’t be the first or last time something from a conference ends up on Ebay.

      I seriously doubt Balmer is going to take it personally and start tcrying over it ;-)

    • Anonymous

      With all due respect, do you honestly believe Windows 8 is going to have any trouble attracting developers? Windows is the dominate OS on the market. It will have far greater developer support than iOS or Android will ever have. They simply gave them out so the developers in attendance could get started developing for the platform.

    • Guest

      To be honest, they didn’t “just gave them out”. Well, I guess they did, but to developers in attendance who _paid_ several G’s for the conference. 

    • http://twitter.com/oolong2 oolong2

      Trouble attracting developers? NO 

      Trouble attracting deevlopers from iOS and Android perhaps a YEAR before your OS is released?  YES.

      Serious development is useless without a physical device.  You can talk about your OS all day but until it’s on an actual physical device it might as well not exist.  Microsoft knows this.

      “They simply gave them out so the developers in attendance could get started developing for the platform.”

      Exactly….  They also gave out multi-touch laptops at the last PDC.  It is all to get developers to start working on software EARLY for their new OS.

      It’s the same reason they released a Windows 8 Developer Preview version.

      It’s called “promotion”….

    • Anonymous

      not really. microsoft wants these tablets to be in the hands of developers that will use them. obviously those that are selling it theirs will not use them. plus build is so ungodly expensive to go to that the seller doesn’t even break even.

  • http://www.blogmfc.com pierre_mf

    It’s cheaper to buy a Win7 slate (like Asus EP121) and install Win8 on it. Works perfectly.

    • Anonymous

      Yeah, hopefully people know that and no one buys from the jerk trying to sell for $2,700.

    • Guest

      Too late. The starting bid was $2000, but the highest bid is $2700 now. 7 bids were made until now. 

    • http://twitter.com/OldCongress Gamer

      Don’t be silly, that’s 64gb ssd, slim design and such.
      It’d cost as much as samsung series 9

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Viki-Maverick/100002523433166 Viki Maverick

    All those people who regretted buying a Windows 7 tablet, their moment of redemption has arrived with Windows 8. Just install and never look back.

    • Anonymous

      Totally agree. I bought the Dell Inspiron Duo with Windows 7 and am much happier with it running Windows 8 Developer Preview. What an amazing difference. Works beautifully considering it only has a 1.5GHz processor.

    • Guest

      Hey. I installed W8 on my Dell Inspiron 6400 but I don’t get the right graphic driver. I can only use 1024 x 768. Did you have any success with that?

    • http://www.blogmfc.com pierre_mf

      You may want to have a look at MS Windows 8 developer preview forum http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdeveloperpreviewgeneral/threads

    • Guest

      Thank you for a very good hint. 

    • Anonymous

      Video worked OK for me on the Dell Inspiron Duo (guessing 6400 does something special). And the only real issue I’ve seen so far is that the Accelerometer is not detected under the Windows 8 Developer Preview, so it does not sense when I’ve turned the device sideways. Probably since it is in the early stages. I can live with that for now though. I’m still amazed by how much smoother it is on this slow processor. Windows 7 was obviously much jerkier.

  • Anonymous

    Just think of it this way though. Whoever buys these will likely be interested in supporting (and possibly developing for) Windows 8 anyway, so either way, Microsoft has reached their goal in sharing devices to help promote the new platform. Plus some added publicity on eBay =)

  • http://www.Nave360.com Sebastian Gorgon

    i’m mad at them… 

  • chappi

    Bear in mind MS charged $3k to attend Build. These tablets probably cost MS ~800 each, in bulk.
    MS has also massively alienated its development community with a lot of its Windows 8 moves (phasing out Silverlight & WPF, making Metro apps be loaded through their store, which has a 30% tax, …)
    “Giving” out tablets was not an act of generosity, it was an attempt to buy some developer love at a time that MS badly needs it. Despite this, a lot of developers came away bitterly disappointed, having invested years in their products and now being stabbed in the back by MS. Can’t say I blame a few of them for selling these things on eBay to recoup at least a small fraction of the damage MS has done them.

    • GP007

      What moves exactly?  When did Silverlight get phased out?  WPF maybe, but not SL.  SL5 is going to go final soon and no one forces you to sell your apps through the windows store at this point.     I think you and some others are overreacting.

    • chappi

      *Lots* of others. If there’s this much FUD amongst developers, somebody at MS certainly screwed up. Over at Silverlight.NET there’s a thread with > 20 million views on this exact subject. If anyone really believe that Silverlight is here to stay, then I suggest you read that before starting any large new projects on the platform… It’s being phased out, and MS execs at Build couldn’t even deny it.

    • Anonymous

      They said the same thing about LINQ and it turned into something else (while retaining a lot of the original LINQ).  Was it that they didn’t deny it or was it that they wouldn’t comment on it?  I’m wondering what they’d use to replace SL at this point?

    • http://twitter.com/TroyGates TroyGates

      Can you point to a source of the 30% tax? I didn’t see it in the keynote or the build session on the store.

    • Guest

      He doesn’t talk about Microsoft. It’s Apple he is talking about ;)

    • Anonymous

      he says that because Windows Phone 7 charges 30%….
      you know, people talking crap, who wants everything secure, free and only business for them
      but i bet he probably isn’t even a developer. so that makes his comment crappier.

    • Anonymous

      hahaha, so true, its so amusing reading comments from wanna be programmers.  they can copy paste all their google searh results but it doesn’t mean that they will actually make sense.

    • Soratech

      Actually silverlight java and html5 are all support for application development in windows8. You just have to use the app store for metro apps.

  • Guest

    Thank you for a very good hint.

  • Icex

    Developers, Developers, Developers…?  They should be selling discounted Windows 8 tables to MSDN subscribers for all of us to start developing for Windows 8 slates.

    • Anonymous

      im with you on this one

  • Anonymous

    people who get them something for “free” just to sell it… are… i dont know the word, but i can use idiots. its like these people saying they would get Xbox and laptop when Microsoft gave a Xbox for free to students and some people were like they would sell the Xbox bla bla. i think its stupid… yeah money its nice but i dont like if someone gets something the would resell it that way.

    if they wouldn’t be using it, why they accepted it? oh yeah… to sell it on ebay, how profesional and ethical is that. but its such a human behave being idiots.

  • http://twitter.com/SaadElBoury Saad El Boury

    cheaper to buy a dell latitude xt refurb from dell. it’s a fine dev platform for W8, i have been using it for about 48h and happy to report that it works like a charm! i still can’t believe this is a developer preview build!

  • Prakash Heda

    amazing experience  on w500 to me, w8 works so well and 10″ is perfect size as well

    • Anonymous

      I’m thinking of getting a w500..  have you tried netflix on there yet? new silverlight 5 RC is out, but not sure if the hardware acceleration is working with netflix yet.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Aziz-Tukubaev/100000687532028 Aziz Tukubaev

    So which tablet will be best choice for me to buy in order to try Windows 8 developer preview on it, so that i can later upgrate to final build? Please advise ))

  • Anonymous

    If it sells for more than $3000, he’ll recoup the cost of the conference. Good for him, but bad manners if you ask me.

  • http://www.callumpy.co.uk Callumpy

    Motherfuckers.

  • John Doe

    I first thought that over excited dumb asses bumped the tablet past $2000. Than i looked at the starting price.
    well, it looks like his //build/ trip is going to be free of charge. +SOME!

  • Guest

    Tom, you’re not promoting your own auction on Ebay, are you?  kidding!

  • Ackbar

    As someone who bought one of these:

    There isn’t any substitute to developing on real hardware. The touch responsiveness on Win7 devices is allegedly not nearly as good in virtually all cases. The gyroscope is really important for anything you’re developing that takes advantage of the physical orientation of the device.  The TPM makes it possible to join a work domain with Bitlocker requirements for mobile devices.  There’s no alternative if you want to develop with the NFC functionality in Win8.

    Some people went to the conference for driver development, hardware development, back-end server development, and even WP7 development.  There were lots of sessions for all of these. I’m glad they’re able to get rid of these, recoup some of their costs, and get them in the hands of people who want to do development related to the new interface. 

    I didn’t pay at the high end of what they’re going for now, and my plan was to get a Series 7 if I had to pay $3000+ as an alternative.  I’ve tried using my desktop’s touchscreen but the thick bezel and poor touch responsiveness (resistive) make it impossible to swipe from the sides and obviously there aren’t anywhere near the right number of sensors. My convertible notebook works a bit better but still has plenty of issues.

    Sure I paid way more than I ever would for a device for personal use or playing around, but there’s no substitute for having a real device to develop on (as most mobile developers and particularly anyone hooking up a Wiimote to the WP7 emulator to emulate an accelerometer would know).