In viewing an eye chart on the Surface and the new iPad, the smaller text elements the ones you may find yourself squinting hopefully at while standing at the DMV are noticeably cleaner on the iPad's 2, x 1, display. Still, since the iPad scales up all its content to match the older, lower-res tablets, much of that resolution is going to waste. In fact, load up the same webpage on both tablets and you'll see far more content on the Surface than the iPad, thanks at least in part to the aspect ratio here.
You wouldn't think a 3mm-thick piece of polyurethane could make for a comfy keyboard, but the pressure-sensitive Touch Cover is a compelling companion to your written missives. Just give yourself a little time to get used to it. Microsoft warns it could take four to five days to reach your peak touch-typing speed. That sounds about right to us, which is a bit unfortunate; you'll need to pay up to buy one before you know for sure whether you'll really like it, even if you get a chance to sample Surface at a Microsoft Store.
But, if you're on the fence, we'd recommend making the extra investment for the cover. The first 30 seconds or so will feel mighty disorienting, a sensation that evolves into uneasiness over the next few minutes as you figure out how to successfully insert an exclamation point and experiment with how much pressure is really necessary. It's also a matter of trust: think about how gingerly you used your first BlackBerry's keyboard, or how carefully you typed out text messages on your first touchscreen phone.
It took time to figure those typing systems out, and there's another learning curve to ride here. It's worth it, though. Within minutes we were typing at a brisk clip, making surprisingly few errors along the way. It helps that there are small indentations on the F and J keys just like a proper keyboard, marking the home position for each of your index fingers. The keys are also spaced well enough that you're unlikely to hit the wrong letter by mistake. It's no sweat if you do: the backspace and spacebar keys are easily found without looking down.
In fact, as Microsoft was developing the product, it gradually widened the spacebar after some large-handed focus group testers found themselves mistakenly striking the touchpad instead. It's the familiar layout and functionality that's the best part of the Touch Cover. If you're a regular PC user you'll quickly and happily find that all your typical keyboard shortcuts work exactly as you'd expect them.
Arrow keys make for quick and easy navigation through text files, like the one in which this review was written.
We're inclined to think that touch typists will come to grips with the Touch Cover more quickly than with a more tactile keyboard on another tablet OS. Still, that tactility is something to overcome. The biggest challenge we had in acclimating to the Touch Cover was learning just how much pressure to apply.
Use it for a few minutes and you'll realize you can tap the "keys" lightly and quickly while watching as full, perfectly spelled sentences flow onto the screen. Get too cavalier, though, and a letter will fail to register, forcing you to back up and try again with a little more force. Again, though, you'll likely overcome such missteps after practicing for the prescribed business week.
Because the Touch Cover is so photogenic -- it is available in five colors, after all -- you might not have known about the Surface's other keyboard, the Type Cover, so named for its tactile, conventional-looking keys. Here, too, there's a slight learning curve, though perhaps gentler than the Touch Cover's. Once again, we found we could type quickly with a low error rate, though we never totally got used to the closeness of the keys -- they're packed very tightly and feature flat caps, meaning they very nearly bleed into one another.
It's a bit of a shame that there aren't more Microsoft Stores: the ideal solution would be to wander in, play with both keyboards and see if you're a more of a Touch or a Type fan.
In either case, you'll find a small elf of a touchpad sitting beneath the spacebar. Our prediction: you won't bother with it much. It comes in handy if you're working in a desktop app like Explorer or Microsoft Word and need the kind of precision finger input can't offer.
Most of the time, though, we followed our intuition and just tapped on the far more responsive touchscreen. The trackpad does support two-finger scrolls, which you might use if you're looking at a website and don't want to get your finger in the way while you're reading -- or if you're a stickler for staying as close to the home row as possible. Just don't expect such gestures to be recognized in the smoothest of manners.
And, in case you were wondering, closing either cover will disable the display on the Surface, much like the magnetic iPad covers from Apple. But, we were rather disappointed by the lag here. There's a good three-second wait before the display pops back on after flipping open the cover. That compares unfavorably to the one second or less time on Apple's option. Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying if you're just flipping it open to take a quick peek at something.
Since we're not yet aware of any benchmarks tailored to this operating system, we'll stand on this: Tegra 3 is more than capable of handling Windows RT's Live Tiles and Modern UI. The tablet cold-boots in just under 25 seconds and launches apps briskly.
It responds smoothly to taps and swipes, and we also found that the tablet is quick to respond if you open an app, change your mind and hit the home button before the app is finished loading.
That said, we did notice some occasional pauses when quickly swiping the left side of the screen to toggle between open apps. To be clear, it didn't matter how many apps we had open: in fact, we frequently lost count of how many were running. We rarely bothered to manually close any and the machine never seemed to suffer for it. In short, the performance has a few limitations, but overall, Surface is fast, responsive and stable. The only benchmark we felt comfortable running is the browser-based and platform-agnostic SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.
Here the Surface returned a very, very healthy average score of ms. That's nearly twice as fast as the latest iPad and nearly as quick as our record holder, the iPhone 5 , which burned through the test in ms when we reviewed it. Indeed, the initial rendering of webpages is far faster than the iPad, with the main content and text popping in earlier. But, if you wait for all the content to filter in, overall page load times are comparable between the two.
Riptide GP, in particular, was lots of fun, and we were able to use the on-screen controls comfortably, as well as the built-in accelerometer sensor to move the table side-to-side to control the game. The graphics were vibrant and the frame rate was fast. However, streaming video was a mixed bag. Low bit-rate streams from the likes of the ABC's iView played just fine, but when we fired up our NBA LeaguePass to watch some basketball games at Kbps, the video started losing frames after a short while.
We put it down to the amount of processing required for the network component as well as the video component, as Kbps game streams played back just fine. When streaming movies or TV shows at a relatively high bit-rate, the dropped frames won't be an issue, but for fast-paced sports like basketball, you really can miss a lot of the action.
Again, it's worth noting that videos with a high resolution especially those from Vimeo did not play back smoothly on this device. There is pre-installed Adobe Flash support, which only works with Web sites approved by Microsoft. Using the Surface RT as a tablet offers a good overall user experience.
The Live Tile interface is intuitive for the most part, although sometimes the "live" nature of these tiles can make it hard to find the tile that you are looking for. But the main problem is that you need to switch back and forth between the Windows 8 tablet user interface and the Desktop in order to get things done. For example, if you plug in a USB stick full of photos and you want to open them up in the Photos app, you'll have to first transfer them to the Pictures library.
If you open one photo which opens in the Photos app by default thinking that you can simply browse through the rest of the photos in the folder, you'll be disappointed. You can only flick through them once they are in the library. The app also allows you to flick through photos in your Skydrive and local network locations in addition to the library.
The latter will let you browse the Web in full-screen mode and it offers a superior tablet experience to the Desktop version of IE. For example, you can simply swipe back and forth to navigate pages a feature called 'Flip ahead' allows you to flick forward in a site, which is useful for comment threads that have multiple pages, for example ; when you place the cursor in a text box, the on-screen keyboard shows up automatically.
Using the Desktop version of IE, there is no way to flick back and forth between pages instead of using the arrow keys, which are small targets to hit with your finger. You also have to manually invoke the on-screen keyboard any time you want to type in a text field. It's also worth noting that the two browsers are separate environments.
If you are browsing the Web in Desktop mode and want to switch to the full-screen browser, you'll have to navigate to where you were and possibly log to a site in again. Having to manually bring up the on-screen keyboard when using the Desktop and not just the browser was one of the most frustrating aspects of the overall user experience. Placing the text box in the Internet Explorer URL bar, or anywhere else we needed to type, always required that extra step of hitting the keyboard icon in the System Tray or from the Charms menu, and we always had to re-position the screen in order to accommodate it.
Funnily enough, the on-screen keyboard did work automatically when we ran the pre-installed Office suite. The Office suite is only a preview, but Microsoft says that once the full version is released, it will be available for users via Windows Update. It's a suite that allows you to save directly to the cloud that is, Skydrive , which is convenient.
Another annoyance for us, anyway , was the inability of the tablet to share folders by default. We had to go into Services through the Computer Management screen in order to set the 'Server' service as 'automatic'.
We were then able to share data from the Surface RT tablet to other devices on our network. The networking performance overall was rather slow though and, in particular, it took a good few minutes for the Surface RT to be able to access the Windows 7 computers on our network. Going the other way, our Windows 7 computers saw shared folders on the Surface RT in almost no time flat. As for battery life, the Surface RT lasted a healthy 9hr 42min when looping an Xvid-encoded video non-stop at full screen brightness.
When we ran an Internet video streaming test using battery power, it lasted 5hr 5min. Both are very solid results. It took just over 2hr to fully charge the tablet using the supplied power adapter which is the only method of charging this unit.
Only one power profile is present in the settings, but it can be modified. Sometimes the battery indicator in the Taskbar was buggy and showed that we didn't have a battery connected. If your Xbox is synced with the Surface, instead of playing a video on the tablet you can elect instead to play it on the Xbox; however, while HD video looked crisp and clean on the tablet, the same video looks a bit grainy on a inch screen.
Xbox Music allows you to stream free music from a library of 30 million songs. You can also purchase songs and stream to the Surface or on your Xbox. I was impressed by Xbox Music's vast library and the speed at which it skipped to the next track while streaming songs.
I'm still testing out the service, however, so expect a deeper dive soon. The Desktop version looks the same as IE9 currently does in Windows 7, with a similar-looking interface and options.
IE10 Metro has a slightly different look than most browsers. For one, its address bar appears at the bottom of the screen as opposed to the top and both it and any open tabs disappear unless summoned with a swipe from the top or bottom bezel. It also includes a cool feature called Flip Ahead, giving the user the capability to swipe through a multipage story on a Web site without having to click any links. Speedwise, IE10 definitely felt sluggish, especially when pitted directly against the iPad using Safari.
When loading sites like Collider. My overall impression of IE10's browser speed was that it was sometimes fast enough, but I usually felt like I was waiting around longer than I would have liked to. Also, until a page is loaded completely, visible links are disabled and you can't scroll down the page. This can be infuriating if you've already been waiting around a bit just to link to the page initially. Previously, only Microsoft-approved sites were allowed to use Flash, but the shackles have now been removed and the vast majority of sites are now Flash-capable under IE Performance The Surface sports an extremely bright IPS screen with impressively wide viewing angles and a noticeably high contrast.
However, its colors looked muted compared with those on the iPad and Transformer Infinity when looking at the same Web site. With its lower screen resolution, the Surface's text clarity was only marginally lower than the other two tablets. If you looked closely enough for differences, you'd find them, but Microsoft did a great job optimizing the display as it has no problem delivering crisp images. There were many times, while attempting to simply swipe past an app, that I inadvertently launched the app instead, but other than that annoying, all-too-frequent infraction, the screen generally swipes when commanded.
Also, successfully pressing the home button elicits a vibration confirmation, but it sometimes required an additional press before the command was actually applied. App loading takes a bit longer than I'm used to and could definitely use some optimizations. Also, on my unit I did experience a few performance bugs where changes made to settings wouldn't apply until I restarted the tablet. There was also an instance of severe lag that included a disappearing cursor, which required a restart as well.
Firmware update Microsoft released a firmware update for Surface in November As yet, I've not noticed any performance improvements in app, Web page load times, or general navigation. As I said originally, apps on Surface take longer to load compared with what I'm used to on other top tablets and IE10 performance in particular was lacking compared with the same tablets running their default browsers.
This latest firmware update has not addressed these issues as far as I can tell. I compared the speeds of two Surface tablets, one with the update and one without, and didn't notice a difference in performance at all while performing some anecdotal testing. I also tested app and Web site loading speeds compared with both the fourth-generation iPad and Google's Nexus The Angry Birds Star Wars test began when I tapped the game icon and ended when the loading screen disappeared.
The Giantbomb. The results you below are the averages of three iterations that scored within 5 percent of each other. I used Hydro Thunder to test 3D performance. While the game delivers Riptide GP-like screen-splashing effects, its frame rate seemed to max out at around 25 frames per second fps , lower than the average Riptide frame rate on Android tablets with Tegra 3 processors.
Still, until we can see the same games running on each platform, it's difficult to fairly compare performance capability. Front and back cameras were fine at capturing video and pictures. They weren't impressive by any means, but they got the job done. The battery seemed to drain fairly quickly, even at only 33 percent brightness when under several hours of fairly heavy use.
More tablet testing results can be found here. Conclusion Is the Surface worth its price? I think a more useful question is this: if on a business trip, could I replace my laptop with the Surface?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is also no, but these are the reasons why. The overall sluggishness and bugginess in the interface, especially when using IE10, are disappointing. For more info, see Install Surface and Windows updates. After installing Windows 8. Once you do this, the Windows 8 Start screen will no longer appear. If you want to go back to using the Start screen again, just turn the Start menu option off.
Note: If your Surface has more than one user account on it, you'll need to change this setting for each account. If you don't see the Desktop tile, swipe up from the middle of the screen to get to Apps view, and then select Desktop. On the Start menu tab, select the Use the Start menu instead of the Start screen check box. Select OK , and in the message that appears, select Sign out and change Start. When you sign in again, you'll see the Desktop instead of the regular Start screen.
To open the Start menu, select the Start button in the lower-left corner of the screen. If you prefer use the Start screen instead of the Start menu, you can leave the update installed on your Surface and simply turn off the Start menu option.
Follow the steps in Turn on the Start menu above, and clear the Use the Start menu instead of the Start screen check box. When you sign in again, the Start screen will be back.
Install Surface and Windows updates. Trouble installing Surface and Windows updates? Surface update history.
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