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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

It's an everything competitor. It's the tablet/ultrabook answer to the way smartphones merged PDAs and cellphones.

And like those early smartphones, it's got some growing to do. But the market it's trying to carve out strikes me as a real one with real demand. I'm surprised we're not seeing more doctors and other specialists-on-the-go wielding them.

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Kinda tired debating the surface pro on HN, but you hit the nail on the head. This is a desktop computer that sacrifices very little, yet is the size of an iPad with comparable usability. Anyone who voluntarily indoctrinated themselves on the merits of toy mobile operating systems will never understand how awesome the Pro-range surfaces are.

Much like the HTC Dream was basically a first generation joke, I'm hopeful and very much intend to be carrying one of Surface's offspring in my backpack in a few years time.

Hell, I'm interested in using one with Linux (if they've got the wacom issues sorted out, that is).

The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)

I'm excited to see what comes of the Ubuntu tablet distro, but at the same time, they were the ones who made Unity, which isn't really good at anything. So I'm not super optimistic either.

Windows's "metro" UI is obviously touch friendly, but even the desktop can be made touch friendly-ish via its DPI scaling, which I think works pretty well. I haven't been able to get that same usability out of any Linux desktop environment yet. (If someone has, I'd love to know about it!)

> The only problem with using Linux is that there isn't (as far as I can tell) a good Linux UI that's very touch-friendly. The closest one is Unity, and well, that's all I need to say there. (I realize some people like it, but I'm just not one of them, sorry...)

I hope Jolla and Sailfish will help in that department.

Does this mean that the surface pro 2 is a good choice for those of us who don't mind Unity?

Yeah, from a technical standpoint, it runs pretty well. There's still at least one hardware compat issue to be resolved (when I last tried Ubuntu Saucy beta, the wifi didn't work), but it was very performant, and looked nice.

That's good to know. No wifi would be a pretty big buzzkill though. I like the idea of replacing my Mac/iPad combo with a single device. It sounds like the high-DPI screen would be a reasonable replacement for my iPad (a.k.a. PDF journal reader) but I'm far too invested having a competent Unix-like environment on the computer side to live in Windows. Ubuntu's "convergence" tablet vision cannot come quickly enough.

KDE is further along than Unity but still needs a little development to be perfect:

http://plasma-active.org/

Wow, thanks! I didn't know about that. I'll try it!

I run my dev servers in VMWare in Ubuntu on my Surface Pro. It's good enough, but more than a little fussy when it comes to touch (or the wacom issues), so I tend to just use it with the keyboard.

I don't know why Microsoft is doing this to themselves. Instead if being the best in one market they try to create a new one which competes with the tablet and ultrabook market. But their product can be never as good as a tablet or ultrabook. I just don't think that there are many people who are willing to accept that trade-off.

Being the best on one market isn't always as beneficial as being good in a couple of markets. Apart from that you're looking at it from a single perspective making you see only certain trade-offs (which are only there for those expecting a tablet or ultrabook anyway) and not the other side of it. Other people might just see a full-blown laptop running a desktop OS with touch and Wacom. And when you get rid of the keyboard you're left with something that's quite usable as a tablet ans still runs a full desktop OS.

There are professionals on the go who want to carry one device, not two, and have both the use-case for a tablet and a notebook. You can't use a notebook standing up, and you can't run real Windows software on a tablet.

I'm surprised every single doctor in a hospital doesn't own one of these yet, for example.

I guess you mean why every doctor doesn't own 2-3 of these, because battery won't last a day...

That's what the power cover is for.

That's what the power cover is for.

And now it's too heavy to carry around all day every day.

Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the 'Windows' apps I've seen for healthcare are really, really bad (and have UI much too small/complex to use on a touchscreen), whereas the iOS apps I've seen are much more polished, user-friendly, and accessible because they're designed for touchscreens from the start.

It would be impractical in a hospital. It's relatively heavy and where would you put it when you don't need it without risking theft? And how would you prevent unauthorized access to hospital records when stolen? I think the whole tablet at hospitals thing is a fantasy.

All of those concerns exist with a clipboard of papers, and you can't encrypt those.

Right. But who would want to steal a clipboard?

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