Details leak of Microsoft Surface 2, Surface Pro 2 and Surface Book

The Surface Pro hasn’t even hit the market yet and information has already leaked from Twitter about a series of successor devices to Microsoft’s hybrid tablet range.

We’ve heard rumours of a successor Surface device before, shortly after the Surface was announced Microsoft started advertising for new engineers to help with a project and the required skills had all the hallmarks of tablet development.

Now the news is coming via a well-known source of Microsoft leaks, the @MS_nerd Twitter account.

The Surface Pro is understood to be arriving in January 2013, according to a recent Microsoft announcement, but the leaks on Twitter suggest the successor devices will also arrive later in the same year.

The Surface 2 will be the successor to the Surface RT and will therefore be ARM-based, but apparently it won’t be sporting another Nvidia Tegra chip (the Surface RT has a Tegra 3 quad core).

Instead, it will allegedly have an unspecified Qualcomm processor – it’s not clear whether this will be quad-core but we suspect this to be the case.

Interestingly, the display size will be shrinking slightly, rather than having the same 10.6-inch display as the Surface RT, the Surface 2 will have an 8.6-inch screen.

If the leak is a true indication that Microsoft is working on a Surface RT successor model it’s still not necessarily a dead certainty that it would see the light of day. Reportedly Microsoft was disappointed with the Surface RT’s reception and brought the Surface Pro’s release forward as a result.

The Surface Pro 2 will feature an 11.6-inch display, but oddly enough instead of an Intel i5 chip it will have an AMD ‘Temash’, a processor with integrated GPU built specifically for tablets. But, apparently, this is a long way off in the development process, suggesting the Surface Pro 2 will barely make it out of the gate before 2013 closes.

Lastly, there’s an entirely new device, the Surface Book.

It’s a bit of a beast owing to a 14.6-inch display and will also feature an Intel ‘Haswell’ chip using 22 nanometre (nm) architecture. This kind of hardware will only arrive around the middle of the year at the earliest, so again a late 2013 launch for the Surface Book seems likely.

While MS_nerd is a known source for Microsoft leaks there’s no accounting for the authenticity of this information, but even so it is does present a tantalising idea of what Microsoft could have in store.

The company is also said to be working on an Xbox Surface tablet.