Performance
We didn’t get to see Microsoft’s first Surface. One of the downsides of having an in-demand product and only so many review units, we guess, so you can imagine how excited we were to see the Surface Pro.
The concept is intriguing: a tablet designed by Microsoft and crafted out of metal, built to be the showcase for everything Windows 8 is about. Does it work?
Picking it up, you’ll notice the solid magnesium build quickly. That’s one thing Microsoft has made obvious from the get-go: this is a machine designed to feel awesome.
It’s solid, but heavy, and thanks to its overall weight – which is roughly a hundred grams shy of the full kilogram mark – is next to impossible to carry comfortably in one hand and use with the other.
Those of you with bigger hands and a bit of muscle behind them may not have issues here, but we did, and that made the Surface Pro a machine made more for desks, which is an odd prospect for a device labelled a “tablet.”
Using it on a desktop, you’ll want one of the keyboard cover cases.
We had the full tactile keyboard edition, called the “Type Cover,” and this is one of the nicest thin keyboards we’ve ever had the pleasure of using. The keys are large and easy for any typist to become comfortable with, and there’s a nice click to every press, so that’s good too.
There’s no caps lock light, a pet peeve of ours, but at least the keyboard is well designed outside of this, and both left- and right-handed typists will be at ease here. The included trackpad on the cover means you still get a mouse, albeit a small one.
As a portable desktop with the keyboard cover, the Surface Pro is a great experience, and one merely needs to click the kickstand at the back of the case into place to find exactly that.
The screen is lovely and sharp, too, with wide viewing angles and some really lovely text recreation. Overall, it might be seen as a touch too reflective, but looked at dead on, and the Full HD screen is one of the better parts of the package.
You can get a decent amount of work done on the computer, too, and the 1.7GHz Core i5 should be enough for most people.
This isn’t designed for games, and we’d have appreciated a touch more memory, but unless you’re taxing either the built-in Intel graphics or memory too much, this set of specs should be fine.
While the system performance can handle its own, the battery is much less impressive.
It’s a little all over the shop here, but for the most part, you’ll find an unimpressive three to four hour maximum, and that’s through relatively basic tasks such as surfing the web, writing documents, and general usage.
Use it less and you might find more life is possible, but we didn’t manage more than a couple of days on standby, and this is one machine you’ll want to leave on charge often.
A shame, too, as this is the big demonstration for Microsoft, and yet it doesn’t last as long as some of the other tablets produced by other brands.
