As part of a U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing, Microsoft has confirmed that it will begin selling its Surface Tablet from October 26th 2012 - the same day that Windows 8 will be available to consumers. There is still no offiical information on the price point of the Surface. To achieve market success the generally accepted wisdom is that Microsoft need to hit as lower price point as possible - e.g. as Google did with the Nexus 7 Android tablet, but there has been speculation that price points will be relatively high. 

The Microsoft Surface will be running Windows RT, and is based on ARM architecture. This is different to the desktop version of Windows 8, by virtue of not having a full desktop mode, apart from accessing the File Explorer and the complementary "RT" versions of the Microsoft Office Applications.

During the press event where the Surface was presented, which we reported on, Microsoft also confirmed that the Surface Pro will be released 90 days after the ARM-based Surface. The Surface Pro will be based on Intel Core Ivy Bridge architecture and will be running the full version of Windows 8. The SEC filing mentioned above gave no details of the Surface Pro, and so we presume that the 90 day delay of the Surface Pro has not changed.

You can read more about the Surface and Surface Pro in our original report.