My review of the Surface Pro | Hacker News Reader

My review of the Surface Pro

tiamat.tsotech.com

46 pointsbhauer64 comments

"The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it does. I am a little surprised to realize there is no preinstalled software that transcribes handwriting into written notes nor does any Office application do that."

I feel like hits on a big problem for Microsoft. They've come up with a whole bunch of fancy new gizmos (Metro, Surface) - but it's all resting on top of a mountain of random legacy cruft, and they haven't tied it together or done anything really to iron out the weird inconsistencies. Great, here's a brilliant pressure-sensitive pen. What? No, we haven't made anything for you to use it with. Nope, sorry, no accommodations for it in the OS. Sorry man - too busy coming up with crazy new shit (and slapping it onto small portions of the interface)!

I'm using Windows 8 now, and, mixed with Windows Phone 7.5, Outlook.com, attempts to integrate calendar and to-do lists, being forced to use the monstrosity that is the Zune phone software, I have to say, holy shit Microsoft - time to do some spring cleaning. I really hope instead of charging on to the next big thing, Microsoft focuses on consolidation for Windows 9 - delving in to all the random nooks and crannies, clearing out the legacy cruft, unifying the interface, smoothing out the inconsistencies between Metro and Desktop, streamlining their mobile-desktop integration, streamlining their web services. Otherwise, god, how much longer can they go on coming up with the new Next Bestest Thing to mash into the pile of random crap that Windows has become?

> The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it does.

This reviewer is (admittedly) clueless about OneNote, which basically has its own cult following. He also doesn't seem to be the kind to be heavily using a "poor man's Cintiq." I look forward to a review from one or both of those groups. Yes, a stylus is kind of niche. It's not exactly obscure, either, though. I'd like to see reviewers go into detail about graphics and design related programs.

Isn't onenote for metro a free download from the windows store?

I tried to get my wife interested in the tablet PC (I have a Samsung tablet running win8 with a waccom digitizer), but she says its kind of small for sketching and the hand obscures the screen anyways, not as good as her Intuos; she has never tried an Cintiq.

It is a free download. It's pretty slick.

My wife used the original version of Onenote back in the day on her Toshiba Portege tablet convertible. After picking up the Surface I called her up (she was working on a Saturday, yuck!) to ask, "So, uh, does Onenote actually recognize handwriting or what?" I described the silly assumption I had made that Onenote might have a mode for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write and she laughed at me.

Good thing the pen wasn't a chief deciding factor. I thought it would be awesome. It's not.

Maybe in the future. The pen hardware seems solid.

I described the silly assumption I had made that Onenote might have a mode for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write and she laughed at me.

OneNote, or more accurately, Office, does have this feature. I used it quite a bit in law school on my HP TouchSmart tm2 (a tablet/laptop hybrid that comes with a stylus and which predates the iPad). It's enabled in the Office Language Settings bar/menu.

OneNote also has an OCR function which can convert images into text (but not in realtime). It's only as good as the legibility of the image to be converted.

Are you referring to the black handwriting panel that you can switch to from the virtual keyboard? If so, yes, someone else pointed that out and that's nearly what I had in mind. I'm going to have to give it a test run to see if I can use it efficiently enough.

That said, my delusional/fictional Onenote--the application I had in mind when I thought, "Surface Pro pen + note application = awesome" was one that converted text scribbled on the page into digital text in-place as I wrote.

It may end up being a mostly academic difference, of course. I look forward to testing the black handwriting panel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kownnnxs7eI There has been a pen input method since Vista at least.

Yes, this review was obviously written with very little research. On the one hand this, pen input works very nice since XP tablet edition. Even in windows phone 6, pen input was very advanced. On the other hand, the reviewer asks about how apps are closed. You can either swipe from top and drop it down, or on the left swipe you get open apps and can right-click/tap continuously to get contextual menu and close.

A review with not much research is still a valid review - namely on what even somewhat technically savvy users aren't able to intuitively find out about Windows 8 usage. See also the inability to close metro/new-style/whatever apps. I didn't find that out myself when I tried Win8 for 10min or so. And it's not like killing those apps isn't necessary like on iOS, since the behavior changes when they are open, i.e. Windows button doesn't switch to Desktop anymore.

Additionally, the non-techy user is most likely never going to research how to get around their frustrations. First impressions and all that.

Somewhat agree with that too. Actually the non-techy user is likely to flood the techy with questions, until they get to the speed of use they are used to. Some will never close their applications or will do it once in a while from task manager. But, as non-techies, they will not even consider downgrading back to windows 7, either.

I am not questioning the validity of the review. But it is a review that demonstrates how things look to a totally new user in her/his first hours with the OS. I am myself a somewhat technical savvy user and could not find these things out initially with Windows 8. I believe that it takes about one week to get used to. Not that bad. But if this one week is too much for the eventual adoption it remains to be seen. Not killing the apps still gets you to the start screen, though. It is only that if you press it twice it gets you back to the application. Some of these things seem intuitive (i.e. like clicking start twice in previous windows versions, or pressing the start button twice, was opening the start menu and closing it again.)

See, the root of the problem with the start screen behavior for me is that the desktop is treated like a metro app. It's true that you can get used to this, but I'm pretty sure it's one hell of a stretch for 'normal' users. It just looks and works too differently from metro apps and you don't get any kind of benefit, since for example the charms don't work and there is no additional touch integration.

Thank you for posting the video, wbkang. I'm going to give that a try.

As you can imagine, I jotted all of this down as a first-impressions stream of consciousness.

As a pen-input newbie, I wasn't even aware the virtual keyboard had a pen mode. That's close to what I had in mind. I still find it bizarre that it's not more integrated with Onenote.

Wow, that background animation slowed my Firefox to a crawl. Works quite well on Chrome though. Fancy stuff. HTML5?

Edit: Wow, actually a lot going on in this guy's site. The little animated menus bottom left and right of the article. The filter searchable previous posts. The swivel-transition topic group-changes. The speed-controllable animation. Pretty neat, fanciest blog I've ever seen!

Shame I can no longer hear anything thanks to the roar of my laptop's fans!

Text only link for TFA: http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftiamat.tsotech.co...

Thank you for that. My god, how can anyone think that animation is necessary?

Fully loads 1 core of my i7. Who the fuck makes things like this.

Just wanted to post the same OT: i5 spinning at 3 GHz. No comment.

Bottom right corner has a submenu for background animation (confusingly says 'normal' by default).

Perhaps it's fitting that the website is tiamat.tsotech.com and the offending animation appears to be in a file called tiamat.js:

"In Babylonian myths, Tiamat is a huge, bloated female dragon that personifies the saltwater ocean, the water of Chaos."

Source: http://www.pantheon.org/articles/t/tiamat.html

I recommend NoScript.

Eh, I find NoScript a bit extreme. Really makes you realise how common Flash elements are...

Yeah, generally I have no problems with Flash, and I find having to enable everything or stare at gutted pages irritating. Plus, how do I know what an element is until I enable it - so how am I supposed to know which elements I want to enable?

(If you have any tips I'm missing, feel free to fill me in.)

Safari on my MBP slowed down to grave. (Wonder how it fares on a surface pro with IE10)

52520- Google Chrom 98.2 00:15.20 6/1 2 114 296 22M 74M 60M 107M 873M 799 799 running 501 30984

98.2%! Silly background animation. Looks cool, but clearly totally inefficient.

I'm actually very grateful that background was there and running - because it reminded me I'd turned my NoScript off yesterday to deal with a particularly recalcitrant payments site...

<sarcasm> I'm so glad html5 has saved us from the cpu eating plague of flash websites. </sarcasm>

You can turn the animation off using the menu at the bottom right. Having written a few blog entries about how much desktop PC technology has stalled out, I chuckle a bit that a modern PC struggles to do some two-dimensional SVG/SMIL animation.

Thanks for the comments. If you like it, you may be among the minority. :)

That background made the article unreadable for me. Both because it slowed down the browser and scrolling, and because it was incredibly distracting.

The attitude made the article marginally readable for me. Both because it was a bit incoherent, and because it was incredibly distracting.

The use of 'datas' annoyed me. Data is already plural. The singular form is datum.

I'm assuming that, in this case, he was using it for comedic effect.

You can remove it by hovering over "normal" in the bottom right can clicking "stop animation".

Why should we even have to? What is this, MySpace?

I felt the same way -- if my relatively powerful laptop is not rendering the page quick enough to be able to scroll down, others probably have an even worse experience!

How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro; am I a professional or not? Do professionals close applications? Professional! (Turns out I just mash function-alt-F4, which seems to do the trick, if a little clumsily.)

Just slide the screen with a finger from top to bottom to close an application.

While you certainly can close Metro apps manually, there's no direct need in terms of resources to do so. Metro apps will be suspended when not on the foreground and removed from memory when free memory gets tight. When switching back, the app is resurrected from the grave.

Such Jesus apps do depend on the developer not being lazy / retard. While MS checks apps during the winstore certification process, sometimes apps slip through that do not react to such events correctly. Using those apps is pretty annoying.

I often need to force restart metro apps gone wild, and I do so in the task manager (didn't know about the finger trick). These are first party apps like Mail also (to be fair, I have to do this in iOS also, no app is perfect!).

If you have two monitors, you can toss the whole Metro interface from one to the other under Windows 8. It's efficient and effective.

I don't use metro much on my desktop, just laptop and surface RT unit. The network sucks here in china, and most metro apps don't deal with it very well.

Sure, it's the developer being a retard. Not WinRT's fault for a model which pushes more complexity onto the apps than more straightforward multitasking would, in addition to the behaviors being difficult to test and discover.

I tried that on a laptop touch pad. Didn't work.

You must do it really from the top of the screen to the bottom for it to work.

sigh. Who came up with this brilliant gesture? Seriously..

You're not supposed to close applications.

Thanks, shin_lao! I got a tweet about this too. Holy cow, that was not intuitive. I tried swiping from the top, but the context menu at the bottom appeared. Apparently, not a long-enough swipe from the top.

So I discovered the "sort of task list" you get by swiping rightward from the left and then back to the left. I tried then dragging the thumbnails up, down, left, right. Nothing.

I figured eventually I'd take the time to search for a how-to, but what I was doing was just a stream-of-consciousness.

How did you avoid the 15 minute tutorial which launches up when you start Windows 8 and teaches you all of these things?

Huh. I saw no such tutorial on either my desktop or the Surface. The Surface just gave me a "swipe up to get started" animation and that was that. I was at the Start menu.

So I guess I avoided it by not seeing it at all.

Once you know it--the close swipe--it seems obvious enough. But just randomly swiping this way and that, I didn't stumble upon the long-swipe-from-top, which is not to be confused with the short-swipe-from-top which opens the context menu at the bottom of the screen.

Anand's review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-rev...

Intel's Core i5 really shows its power here compared to the ARM chips in the benchmarks, but with the obvious downside of battery life. But when Haswell's out, that should start to change as Intel get more aggressive on the power usage side of things.

Hi there. I couldn't find any email address (or indeed any about/contact page at all), so I thought I would tell you here that scrolling on your blog is completely broken. Also, if a user middle clicks a link, he or she probably does not want the content to replace the current content.

What device are you using to read it?

Middle-click should open in a new tab. Looks like a difference of behavior between Firefox and Chrome though. Firefox apparently isn't sending a middle click to the click handler on the anchor tag and I incorrectly assumed that would be the case for all browsers. I'll get that fixed up.

Scrolling though?

And all the griping about the background is nearly convincing me to turn it off by default.

Any reviews out there that address how developer tool chains look? How does Unity 3D do? How about Linux on a VM for web development work? Maybe even some feedback on how something like nodejs running at the command line and serving web requests for a dev environment looks?

Ok, a hypothetical. Valentine's Day coming up and my wife who is very non-technical has (1) mentioned a surface in the last few months and she never mentions things like that, (2) has developed a strong dislike for Apple (the company) and has no desire for an iPad or iPhone, (3) was raised on PC's and Windows and does not adjust to change in that regard. Let's say that she already has a laptop that is relatively new, but she spends a lot of time on the couch and doesn't take the laptop off the dock, and might enjoy having a tablet next to her on the couch.

Now the question. Should I get her one, and if so, which one?

You sure she'd like something that heavy? Why not a low-weight Android tablet that can mirror her PC so she can do Windows without Windows on the tablet?

I for one want pen input, but under condition that it would allow me to rest my hand on the screen. It should, basically, recognize the pen input exclusively and ignore all other touch events, if I tell it to do so. Sketching or writing all the while hovering your hand and ensuring it never touches the screen is not exactly the pinnacle of convenience. If Microsoft ever gets around adding this to Surface, they will get an edge... but, perhaps, by copying an idea from an HN thread :-)

Doesn't the Surface Pro do that? I was under the impression that the pen on the Pro used a Wacom mechanism, not just a $5 capacitive stylus like you'd use with an iPad.

> Most importantly, despite my obsession with PAO, that remains a figment of imagination. Harsh reality says that whether I like it or not, each device I own is an island. An island with an international airport, but an island nevertheless.

Sounds like a Chromebook might have been a better solution? Except he seems biased against the laptop form factor for some reason.

Samsung ones even have matte screens.

Yes, a little biased against the laptop form-factor. But mostly biased against Google owning all my stuff for me. I'd rather I own my stuff and access it everywhere without "synchronization" from my compute/data server. But that might as well be science fiction.

It's a browser so you can put as much or as little into Google as you'd like.

It sounds like you're just really looking for something like the dumb terminals idea Sun was peddling years ago.

Yeah, to an extent. Roughly that idea but with always-on broadband, high-DPI touch screens, and shared, concurrent application state across all terminals. I wrote more about what I'd consider ideal at http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

I really, really fail to understand how this is not a super-expensive laptop, essentially? Is it considerably smaller/faster than an ultrabook?

I'll grant that this is an interesting attempt at converging two devices, but such attempts ultimately succeed or fail based on how well they can replace either device. Would this thing replace your laptop? Your tablet?

Where is the 8GB RAM version? Or the version with 256GB SSD? I would have instantly splurged for 8GB, but old articles were wrong about it existing.

It's a great machine, but I want to be able to run applications that take more than 4GB. VMware.. Photoshop..

(Admittedly it's nice to have a dedicated machine just for OneNote.)

Nice choice of jump drive. It's so silly but I love it, it's simple and versatile. I've got it on a carabiner for easy access.

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