Playing Around with the Microsoft Surface Pro

We bought a Microsoft Surface Pro for the office and I got to use it in a real world test. The Pro is actually pretty fun to use, I'm currently using the stylus to write this post and it's pretty fun to write cursive again. I was just thinking about not being able to and not needing to write manually anymore. With the Pro I can use the stylus (quite a nice one by the way, with multiple secondary buttons) to write manually, which I am getting quite the kick out of.

Pro's design is pretty interesting, and I'm not sure it's in a good way. There is a bit of a ridge surrounding the device, which makes sense as there is a kickstand at the bottom of the device that clicks out, but there is nothing at the top, which makes it a bit odd that the ridge is present. It makes it a bit hard to quickly orient the device if you take it out of a bag or pick it up without looking. Apart from that the design is pretty nice and I was able to quickly figure out the buttons and get comfortable with the layout.

The camera front and back cameras are OK, but nothing to write home about. The screen is 1080p and looks pretty good in most lighting situations that I used the Pro in. One of the most interesting additions to the Pro are the "covers" that you an attach to it. When I first received the Pro we got a Touch cover to go with it. The Pro does not ship with a cover included and so we decided the Touch cover was the way to go. That cover is flat, and has almost no tactile feedback to key presses. This led me to make a lot of spelling mistakes, the majority of which came from missing letters, as I could not register whether or not the key was actually pressed. I type fairly quickly, so I'd go over my work and notice a lot of misspellings.

We then got a Type cover which has raised keys, not unlike those you would find on a laptop. The keyboard surface is a bit smaller than a standard keyboard, but it took less than 5 minutes to get used to it and start typing with very few mistakes. One thing to note is the track pad, it feels OK and has a few multi-touch gestures that help scrolling. It's smaller than you find on laptops, especially multi-touch ones, but it's usable and helps navigating the UI in desktop mode, if you don't want to poke the screen. Another downside is the speaker system. It’s not powerful, and my Nexus 7 feels louder.

The current iteration is fairly compelling, but may not be the best thing since sliced bread, as they have a few things they need to work on. Mainly the weight. A lot of Macbook Air and iPad users noted that this was a bit heavy for them, but on paper, with a type cover it is only 0.5lbs heavier than an 11" Macbook Air, the fact that it was noticeable to some folks was a bit worrying though. The less powerful (read: useful) Surface RT is lighter, but the Pro is the best bang for your buck. 

It even plays games fairly well. The normal assortment of mobile games is available, and it played Jetpack Joyride like a champ. I decided to test a bit further though and installed Steam on it to see if we could get a few "big kid" games rocking and rolling on it. The Pro played Portal at 1920 x 1080 without an issue. Very impressive.

Overall the Pro is a good start and I can't wait to see what version 2 and 3 are like. Others (like Dell and HP) have started using Windows 8 on form factors similar to this and on Ultrabooks, so there will be lots of other offerings in this space in the near future. I like where this trend is going.