The MS Surface Pro
penny-arcade.com
penny-arcade.com
Even though I don't have the same use cases as him, I feel like I got more out of it this way.
All too often, we focus on what is most relevant to our own particular use cases. Looking at possible Win8 laptops, I'm wanting something comparable to my MBA -- decent SSD storage and ram for development (8gig) -- a few options there, but the options crater when you add the third requirement -- touch.
But I realize, I am not the normal use case and can't judge any particular hardware beyond what my own personal uses may be.
The trackpad was atrocious when I first got it, but they rolled out some driver updates and now it's really good.
The keyboard is sub-par but doesn't bother me too much, and the newer Zenbooks have much better keyboards.
Other than that, everything is awesome. In hindsight I would have waited for the UX31As with the better keyboards but still, I'm not disappointed. It's probably one of the best computers I've ever owned.
Most of the reviewers never seem to consider the idea that using a stylus would be a remotely useful feature and never put any thought using examining it. As a result, the review is mostly useless for someone who does want to use the feature.
For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. Many reviews will put up charts and graphs with benchmarks. But what exactly does a score of (for example) 11,204 mean? The answer, to me, is VERY LITTLE. You can compare it to another phone, but if another phone has a score of, say, 10,000, does that mean this phone is \approx 10% better? Is it 10% faster in what I am going to use it for? No, of course not --- you can't measure how good a device is with a single number, nor even if you single out just its graphics capabilities or whatever slightly more specific metric you choose.
Otherwise, articles might throw more subjective descriptions in the picture. "The experience was very smooth". Maybe reading it through quickly that sounds all well and good, but how much does that tell you? It's still a very vague term simply because many of these products have so many things going on it's hard to encapsulate them in a review in a useful way.
Anyway, in this case, the article pinpoints a very particular task and examines how good the device was at that one task. I think that is already a great sign that you can get a lot more out of this than a much more general review.
It's not that hard, you just need to use it and review that.
Problem is, that takes a good couple of hours of seriously trying out the machine for seriously doing some work. The author of this article even took a couple of days, and did some serious Googling and tweaking to smooth out any wrinkles he encountered (which is the use case for anyone who buys the device because they are expensive: if they "just work" that's great, but if there's a work-around or fix, that's still better than if it "just doesn't work").
But for many review sites, it's much faster to just run some benchmarks (or just copy the numbers from somewhere), compare that to some previous models, some current/similar models, and review that. It doesn't take a lot of effort, time or creative thinking.
If my perspective is correct, look for the Surface Pro to cannibalize sales from MS's "partners." I do expect it to appeal to the kind of person who buys a PC laptop and an iPad. And that's a great market for MS to defend. But for people who want just a tablet, I expect iPads to carry on selling by the container.
If Microsoft's vision of everyone needing a computer is correct, the Surface pro will destroy the laptop. But if Apple's vision of a "post-PC" world is correct, the vast majority of the tablet market will be just tablets, and the iPad will continue to thrive.
It all seems to come down to whether you think of tablets as weak computers with a tablet interface or whether you think of them as an appliances that run software.
But I don't define the tablet market as iPad and only iPad. And it's possible that Apple is wrong and that there isn't a tablet market. Maybe it's just that PCs suck so much, but given time and innovation we'll all end up with really lightweight PCs that have tablet interfaces.
This might just be a phase, just as PDAs were a phase until smartphones subsumed their functionality.
Or maybe the iPad is a terrible Surface Pro :-P
But seriously:
> Maybe it's just that PCs suck so much, but given time and innovation we'll all end up with really lightweight PCs that have tablet interfaces.
Maybe given time and innovation we'll all end up with really open iPads that you don't need to pay for the privilege to run your code on and have touch screens actually deserving of the name "tablet" (meaning you can draw on them).
That would be awesome because those actually are the two main things like to do on my computer, coding and drawing :)
But with the iPad's battery life and (lack of) heat.
It will also have an eInk screen on the back, and a programmable strip of LEDs on the sides. Also a strong, retractable piece of string loop, for if you're in a pinch and you need a wall clock, lamp or as a painting: when you're done working, set it to the "HOME SWEET HOME" screensaver on the eInk side, and hang it on the wall.
Anyone got an idea of how to work a 3D printer into a tablet? Cause we need those, too.
(so that cybercriminals can infect it with a virus that makes it build legs and walk away into the thief's hands)
(and people will still be complaining "if this is the future, where's our flying cars??!")
Given the policies of Apple and Microsoft, I doubt it. Further, I would imagine that more and more machines will be locked down because security is now more important, generates link-bait headlines, and "failures" of security / privacy get your CEO dragged in front a congressional committee.
Common, this is so childish... As if other devices don't get hot and don't weight that much.
You are very wrong in thinking that company X will take over the world. There are different people with different needs. Hipsters like hip devices, cartoonists like Surface Pro's.
jacquesm points it out: the iPad market might still be the biggest but it's not the only market.
I own an iPad and an iPad Mini. Neither has ever run so hot that it was uncomfortable to place on my lap. The review specifically states that he did experience it running too hot for his comfort. I read that the surface pro is 2 lbs, while a full-sized iPad is less than 1.5 lbs.
Nowhere did I state that company X, Y or Z will take over the world. In fact, I stated that the market for people who want a laptop and a tablet may be wll-served by the Surface Pro rather than a laptop plus a tablet.
Are you responding to my actual comment? Or are you reflexively responding to me as if I was saying things that other people are saying?
"Nowhere did I state that company X, Y or Z will take over the world." No you didn't but you made it clear that you think only Apple can serve the tablet market because you explicitly mention the iPad all the time. You also compared Microsoft's vision vs Apple's vision as if these are the only two companies in the tablet/laptop market.
"Are you responding to my actual comment? Or are you reflexively responding to me as if I was saying things that other people are saying?" I was responding to your actual comment and I think you also are saying things that other people are saying. But that didn't trigger a reflex ;) I responded because I don't agree with you. I think a comparison between 2 companies is wrong because it's not what matters in the real world. There are a lot of different devices serving different needs. I don't think the laptop or desktop will go away any time soon because they are still very relevant.
They are not running portal 2, league of legends or sketchbook either. Those are natural trade-offs where Apple sacrifices productivity and Microsoft sacrifices portability.
Nonetheless I certainly don't agree with raganwald. They seem to believe that there are two options of which one must win. In actuality there are thousands of options, and all of them can win in their niche.
In this case it's a guy who sketches online comics. I appreciate their review and completely get where they're coming from, but the things that are valuable to them are not at all valuable to me.
So I'm extremely familiar with the fact that it runs on iPads :-)
In order to make it run we had to downsize the art and make several optimizations.
The last time I ran that game was on an Ipad 2 so that might changed with the last generation, but giving that experience I find very impressive that Surface Pro can run PC games out of the box in a satisfactory way.
Top of the line PowerVR chips always launch on Apple hardware, and by the time they trickle down to its competitors Apple has a new product featuring a successor around the corner.
As someone who has used both the iPad 2 and an iPad 4, the graphical performance gap is significant.
I'm sure some companies would love to see a world where we all access the cloud from iThinClients, but the reality of the situation is that even if the US had great broadband connectivity, nobody wants to deal with 5-200ms of UI lag or with glitchy client-prediction methods.
That's the reason why MS should be willing to spend a boat-load of money on backing the Surface - if they can't create a post-PC world ruled by x86 devices, they are in serious trouble.
I had an old-style swivel tablet (Windows Vista?), and it was a fantastic device to take notes on, invaluable for classwork. OneNote + pen-input really seemed like the future of school computing...but the prices on those machines never came down and the iPad et al took them by storm shortly thereafter.
I had one of these too, an older IBM Thinkpad. The note-taking ability was definitely invaluable. If I were taking college over again right now I would seriously consider a Surface over a Macbook for this reason alone.
However, while I am excited by the machines that are coming out nowadays (surface pro, thinkpad helix to name a few) that will give me both the tablet and laptop experience, I'm dismayed that they're going the way of apple in terms of not giving us access to replace the battery/switch out drives/upgrade RAM on our own. If someone put a door on the backside of a thinkpad helix, I'd buy it for sure.
My best success with tablet note taking is an app I have that records talks and drawing and plays the drawing back along with the audio.
I highly recommend it if you're in the market for that kind of device. They've only gotten better as more companies discover the power of tablet PCs.
Jobs has also stated a belief in one thing, and then contradicted it later. Take the original iPhone screen size, for example.
Also, I think he was against stylus UI. Somehow, I don't think he would be pro for the compromised capacitive stylus experience you get on the iPad.
But yeah, iPhone screen size.
"If you expect the iPod to do video, you're mistaken".
"You don't need copy and paste if you do the UI right".
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-...
And this refers to the interface.
In the past there were touch interfaces that were fiddly and required a pen to interact.
Jobs believed that was a poor interface.
For example, the new Office 365 for Windows still has loads of awkwardly sized buttons and drop downs, making it difficult to use via touch.
Some reviews have pondered how seriously MS is taking touch interfaces. But maybe this is why the Surface Pro comes with a stylus...
A Pen is just an additional tool to make the tablet experience better in various use cases, just like a bluetooh keyboard.
Sorry about the nitpick, but stuff like this gets on my nerve.
I know a couple of people who take notes on their iPads during math talks, they use what Gabe called an ?eraser tip? capacitive touch stylus and an app that shows you your actual size notes above and has a zoned in box at the bottom where you wrote big. I've tried a similar setup on my Nexus 7 and found it pretty comfortable, I imagine on the larger iPad it's even better.
in a head to head competition the surface would win in note-taking though the ipad might win for the price....
(a) takes care of the organizational aspects of note taking and
(b) makes notes reusable.
The payoff as a student is exam prep: Now you sit at a powerful desktop computer with, say, 2x 21 inch screen estate at your disposal. You have a file explorer, a layout document editor (I use Pages and/or Keynote for this) and a good pdf viewer open (with your exported notes). Now it's a matter of copy & pasting all the information from your notes, the official class notes, literature, etc. onto your layout document which then becomes your summary.
This is of course doable by hand but it's a lot more work and it's not as easy to extend it - you can't just make room for new information on a full piece of paper (and summaries, especially the ones you can take to exams, tend to be very full).
Writing towards the bottom might alleviate that but it's still like a hack around the fact that natural handwriting on capacitive screens is difficult.
Also, doesn't an apple-style commercial where somebody gets an email with a word doc attached, edits it, and emails it back with changes while on the train or something seem obvious....
MS's schizophrenia (or whatever) strikes again on that second one, though: the cheap model comes with Office, the full-featured one doesn't. I guess they're trying to push everyone to subscriptions, but it's one of those cases where having an out-of-box just-works Office doc editing solution would be a great marketing bullet point.
The Surface Pro isn't going to replace a laptop for me, but it comes much closer to being something I'd consider taking as my sole device on a trip than an iPad or Android tablet. (Somewhat amusing in that the laptop it would be replacing on that hypothetical trip is a MBP.)
I'd be curious how well Lightroom runs on the Surface Pro, or similar.
Do that all the time with an iPad. This ad needs to show the pressure sensitive pen. Why not Sketchbook Pro just like in the review? And MSFT needs to pressure Adobe, stat. Get Lightroom pen editing running on it as well.
Almost everyone likes to doodle from time to time, so I'm hoping that Microsoft's push for tablets with actual digitizers in them catches on. So far, the devices aren't exactly where I'd like them to be, but there's definitely some progress being made. Ideally, I'd like to see Apple (the company that claims to be for creative types) implement a true Wacom digitizer into the iPad. Drawing with a capacitive stylus is like cutting off the tips of your fingers and trying to type. Every attempt at a pressure sensitive workaround for the iPad has thus far been absolutely horrible. If Apple just got over their dislike of the stylus, and implemented a proper digitizer into the iPad, probably every artist in the country would buy one to play around with.
Never tried but I can totally imagine :) From my experiences with iPads, I'd compare it to fingerpainting, but I guess your description is more .. vivid :)
But I get from the article, and how the author seems pretty satisfied with it, that the Surface uses a different, better technology for t6hat?
I was considering the Note 10.1 and ThinkPad Tablet 2 for their pens and stumbled on this comparison last week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncegf0Em7m4
It does appear that the more horsepower your tablet has, the better suited it is to doing pen-based art. It's pretty clear in the video that a full-powered desktop CPU is better than the Atom and the mobile CPU for sketching.
I wish there was a review site for the HN crowd. Someone that would use every device like a software developer would: tinkering with settings, trying to write/run code, integrating with other services, etc. I generally like reviews on Engadget/The Verge but sometimes I feel they care about different things than I care about.
Anyone know of a gadget review site for hackers?
I think this is where Apple's marketing Excels over Microsoft's.
Apple will show you use-cases like this all day long, showing you how their products are a better tool to get your job done.
Microsoft on the other hand -"it has more memory", "USB", "its Powerful", "hd screen", "it runs excel", "side by side apps", "YAWN".
Great article; VERY TEMPTING.
Still, it doesn't exactly present why you would want to have such a device, except for dancing in a meeting room.
People have been doing work on tablets for awhile, have you been to a Starbucks in the states recently?
I live in LA and work near Beverly Hills, and so the vast majority of the people that I see in coffee shops are just posing.
I seriously doubt its posing anymore. When everyone in the coffee shop has an iPad (including the partners), what is there to pose about?
Seriously, there's doing "work" and doing work. I haven't been to Starbucks in the states, but I've been everywhere in Singapore and everytime I've seen people using tablets it's for entertainment, reading the news, or at the very most writing emails.
If your job is writing emails, I concede, you're doing work. But if you're anything except a coffee shop writer then I doubt it. I've desperately tried to justify a tablet for years now but I barely have the motivation to type a text message on a phone and delay most else until I have a physical keyboard and an OS that has a proper window manager.
Many of them are writing papers, doing homework, whatever. You'd be surprised how much work just involves writing something. They almost always have physical keyboards attached to the iPad when they are writing, if you don't look close enough, they look like mini laptops.
Ironically it's the tablets that's much more compatible with their traditional written language. Sure you have pinyin/wubi based IMEs, and touch devices have had hand writing recognition for a long time but it's never really caught on. It's depressing when you're struggling to learn the language and you see native Chinese pull out their phone when they don't remember how to write a character.
If you are learning Chinese, I wouldn't bother on memorizing how to write the characters but rather focus on how to input the pinyin and recognize the right character to select (erm, reading). I know this sounds like giving up, but its the new way.
Tablets are perfectly fine and awesome entertainment devices. Plus, I do nearly all my email on them.
Why does everyone always act like doing work is the only thing that could ever justify tablets?
But ya, I agree. They didn't have to be useful for work to justify their purchase.
Just remember work doesn't only have to entail Excel or Word stuff. Many custom-made apps help businesses be more effective.
>Surface Pro stylus doesn't work on Photoshop anyway.
Not yet, Wacom support on Photoshop is promised in future updates and it will come eventually.
> $400 now
I have to agree that is an awesome price for such a tablet but since I have always been a sucker for full OS, I might shell out more to just get the satisfaction.
The only thing that really annoyed me is that the 150% DPI setting throws off the colour picker in Sketchbook Pro. How is the OS allowing this to happen? It seems stupid that the DPI setting is so badly implemented it actually breaks apps. (I have heard that Civ 5 with touch on the Surface Pro also requires the DPI to be changed.)
It should be completely transparent to the app — this is not the app's responsibility.
Also, the 150% DPI setting is an accessibility feature for people with bad eye sight. All apps on windows desktop should support it. If your app doesn't, and setting it to 150% breaks your app, it's you fault for not spending the resources to support it. It might be a business decision, and that's cool, but it's still your choice. Can't blame it on anyone else.
In a well designed operating system the application should not have to explicitly handle arbitrary DPI settings for correct touch/pointer input.
An unsupported application should simply look blurry if it does not provide correct raster assets for the specified DPI. That's it.
I can imagine though, that fixing that is now fairly high on their issue list. And Windows has used an automatically-determined scaling factor (based on display dpi) since Windows 7 so it's not exactly new.
One specific problem that arises on a Surface Pro is that the touch input on Civ 5 is off unless you set the DPI back to 100%. An app should not have to switch its touch/pointer handling just because the DPI changed.
It seems like the low level input handling should have been wrapped by Windows 8 to handle these cases.
It works wonderfully; and I had indeed considered the Surface Pro for such a purpose, but this device is slightly larger and has 6 GiB of RAM.
It has changed my mind on surface pro. It will still be out of my price range and I am not going to buy it, but it has changed my mind about it.
Best tradeoff for MS with surface series ever? For one tablet, HN is changing its mind?:D
Maybe 2013 will be the year I can buy my dream system :) Currently the Thinkpad Helix seems to be closest; if it had double the battery life, I would buy it without looking further.
Is it possible to put a pressure sensitive stilus on an iPad with bluetooth and app support, or do you need different hardware?
Overall, I like this tablet. For the features it offer, the price seems right... hate to say that.
Microsoft's marketing department cannot sell water to a man who's dying of thirst.
Although -- whoever at Microsoft decided to ship a free Surface Pro to a popular online artist had the right idea. That review probably sold enough Surface Pros to pay his salary for the year.
If my girlfriend took an interest in Civ there'd be a ring on her finger ASAP!
I use a Wacom digitizer daily for notes and sketches instead of using pen&paper. My wet dream is a pressure&tilt sensitive/e-ink based device, but it looks like the Surface Pro is the closest you can get currently - and this is a good review.
If you want a portable device (laptop/ultrabook/tablet) with a good digitizer that you can actually use (that is, wacom based), your options are actually very few.
There is the Lifebook T902, or the ThinkPad X230T. Did I miss anything else? Both are convertible laptops, both are quite heavy, have medium to poor battery life if you extend them with the additional battery, and a lower-dpi screen. I would have expected higher-range graphics on those laptops, but the integrated HD 4000 is ridicolous when you think you basically get the same on an ultrabook.
Not to mention that the price range is simply off. The Surface Pro is way cheaper.
I used an earlier version of the Lifebook T902. It's actually better than having a separate digitizer which takes useless space on the desk, but it's still cumbersome. You cannot draw unless you flip the screen (odd position otherwise). It's really heavy. A clipboard with paper is an all-around better.
There are two segments of markets that are filled by this usage pattern: on-the-go artists, and cheap cintiq replacements. Drawing on a cintiq is just awesome, but wacom has basically a monopole and the prices are just unjustified. Even the Intuos line is, IMHO, overpriced at least by a 2x factor. The sad reality is that they have absolutely no real competition. I tried several NTrig-based digitizers (lately the Vaio Duo 11), and they just suck. The tracking is just worse, many jumps just over a few hours of testing, not to mention that the pressure sensitivity is lower too (when you're drawing strokes it's quite visible unless the software is not interpolating it for you).
Just look at the missed opportunities there are! The Taichi 21 and VAIO Duo 11 are cool, but they use N-Trig. The keyboard on the Lenovo Yoga is awesome, but no digitizer. The Dell XPS 12 looks stunning, but again missed opportunity. It was rumored to ship with a wacom layer, but it didn't finally.
The only downside of the Surface is the keyboard. I tried the flip keyboard of the Surface Rt and I only hope that the keyboard from the Pro is different, because it sucks. Missed keys, zero feedback. Admittedly, it's better than typing on an on-screen keyboard, but the Taichi 21 of the Dell XPS 12 approaches are way better.
As a sad note, the replaceable battery concept is gone on all these modes. You know, I would settle for lower battery life if I could just have 2, or 3. I was actually shocked that at least HP offers the EliteBook Folio 9470m which has a replaciable battery in a thin format (the ultrabook is awesome), so there are really no excuses for it.
Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 2. Dell Latitude 10
For notetaking the refresh speed is not so critical, as the areas to refresh are limited to the writing spot. You would probably notice lag, but if you ever drew with heavyweight painting/retouching programs, lag sometimes is introduced by processing and you just get used to it (you just don't expect immediate results and keep going).
I would still prefer a slight lag and the ability to avoid a glass screen in this case.
You can disable the DPI scale up in the compatibility tab of the file properties of the exe. In this case he could've set it for Sketchbook's exe and the rest of the OS would continue to be at 150%. Hopefully, this is just a temporary stopgap while application developers start supporting high resolutions.
Image of setting:
http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/...
This entire post was about a tablet that runs uncomfortably warm, with buggy software, short battery life, tiny available user storage and an occasionally useful flip stand, but has a pressure sensitive stylus and it is the best. Oh yeah, and Microsoft gave him the device, so I dare say he didn't actually research his options.
Has no one heard of Jot? I'd be interested to read his comparison of the pressure sensive jot on his iPad to the Surface Pro.
Here's a comparison of the two on a Galaxy:
You disagree with him, but you've given no reasons for it... Mr. Anti Microsoft drone.
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As a developer, I still wouldn't buy the device. Partly because it's on the upper end of my budget, but for the most part because of the downsides: heat, lack of serviceability, and most of all I think the compromise that has to be made ie: not being able to use the keyboard while on the lap, is a deal killer. There are cheaper portable machines which are better for developers.
(But want something more spec'd like the Surface Pro)