Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/12/surface_pro_2_review/

'Daddy, can I use the BLACK iPAD?': Life with the Surface Pro 2

Really nice indeed, but will people ever care?

By Gavin Clarke

Posted in Personal Tech, 12th November 2013 11:46 GMT

Review “Daddy, can I use the black iPad?” my four-year-old daughter asks as she spots the Surface Pro 2 I'm reviewing for The Reg. She has, without knowing it, encapsulated Microsoft's problem on Surface in a nutshell.

I’d been passing the Surface Pro 2 around to friends and family at a weekend gathering to garner their feedback. Plenty of beltway journalists and reviewers have had their stab at the Surface Pro and Surface 2 and the reviews are mostly pedestrian, lists of feature improvement since version one a year ago, and inconclusive. It's a hit. It's not a hit. It's a step forward. It's a big change. Meh. This is the tenor of reviews I'm reading. Time for some real-world input.

Microsoft is late on tablets – yes, we know that. But what has been the damage to Microsoft and how does that relate to this review?

Microsoft has lost money. Microsoft has lost market share. But the thing driving both is the loss of "mind share" to Apple. Lose the mental battle and you have a huge hurdle to clear when it comes to persuading people to buy your products.

They're not selling a product - they're selling a rival-to-something-else

That’s exactly what we see now from Microsoft. The company is not selling Surface just on its merits, it is also selling Surface in a comparison grid against named competitors. Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t sell the iPad in a comparison grid against the PC or phone. They just sold it. It just was.

If you believe Microsoft, then the Surface 2 isn’t even a competitor to the iPad at all – the MacBook Pro is the target. “A PC in the form factor of a tablet,” Windows senior product manager Robert Epstein told me.

But, listen Microsoft: Surface is and will be compared to an iPad whether you like it or not, as my daughter proved, and as I found out field-testing this machine. And our family doesn’t even own an iPad.

To try to emphasise the difference with the iPad further, Microsoft is calling the Surface Pro the "most productive tablet ever". By implication, the iPad is a consumer toy - good for noodling away hours on some app but not for really for serious spreadsheeting and emailing.

Surface Pro 2 is for road warriors and desktop masters. So Microsoft would have us believe.

But productivity doesn’t just mean faster processors or more integrated "experiences" as you get with Surface Pro 2: it’s softer stuff, too. Stuff like whether I can use this machine without it getting in my way or tripping me up.

Here, Microsoft has a problem.

Surface Pro 2 with keyboard, photo Gavin Clarke

Surface Pro 2: the tablet Microsoft calls a PC

He ain't heavy...

But as this is a PC/tablet review, let's talk hardware first - especially as that’s the thing Microsoft has been crowing about. We have a machine that’s 10.81 x 6.79 inches and 0.39 inches thick. That’s the first notable thing – dimension is noticeably letterbox format as opposed to the squarer iPad. The screen size seems quite narrow, too – that’s important for later.

If a MacBook Pro is the target, then Surface 2 Pro is certainly smaller and lighter than 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. Surface Pro weighs just under a kilogram versus 1.5kg for the MacBook Pro. But tablets? The iPad Air and iPad 2 both undercut Surface Pro 2 by between a half and a third each. Further, the iPad Air is smaller than the Surface Pro 2, while broadly, on size, it’s more or less a wash between the Surface and iPad 2.

I’ve got a 64GB machine with 4GB memory. Memory and storage are key differentiators as far as Microsoft as concerned, with the Surface Pro can go up to 512GB configurations with 8GB of RAM. The top-of-the-range iPad packs 128GB hard drive and 1GB memory. That 13-inch MacBook Pro runs up to 8GB memory and 1TB hard drive so, here, the MacBook wins on raw numbers.

Processor is the Intel Core i5 for speed; there's a claimed battery life of one week to 15 days on standby; you get a USB 3.0 port and microSDXC card reader with mini display port. There's also a port for an attachable keyboard.

The Surface Pro comes with two things I thought went out with PDAs from the early 2000s: a kickstand – to prop up the screen into one of two viewing positions (on the first machine there was just one position) – and a stylus.

The whole package fits into the fabled VaporMg casing and I’ve been supplied with a Touch Cover 2 – a flat, touch-type keyboard that’s back-lit. This is the keyboard that snaps into the keyboard port. The Surface Pro is priced at £719, while the touch cover sets you back £99.99.

Like my real-world reviewers, I’m new to Surface Pro, so there were no comparisons to the first machines from a year back. All the better, given that’s exactly what most people will be doing if they buy or get given one of these machines.

How did this lot fare?

VaporMg might be cool, but after a few weeks it’s as smeared with greasy fingerprints and as scuffed as any tablet case. So much for "cool".

Strangely for a device with stylus, there’s no slot and it snaps into the magnetised slot for the power lead on the side. To my surprise the stylus doesn’t actually get knocked off and get lost in the bottom of my bag.

Much has been made of the battery life and standby time. I can vouch it holds up, going for days without a recharge.

Let’s talk keyboard. First things first, turn off the irritating toc-toc-toc sound effect when typing that's turned on by default, it seems. If you don’t want to type onto glass, you have the Touch Cover.

Touch me, touch my cover

The Touch Cover has the sensation of thick card with the texture of felt. If you’re used to keyboards it’s an adjustment, like running on dirt in bare feet as there's nothing to cushion your joints - but this time it works on your fingers.

The typing on screen is fluid: characters seem to scroll onto the page as you hit the keyboard, laid out smoothly like an unfurling roll of carpet, not punched onto the screen like a typewriter. It feels silky. Graphics are sharp and colours rich thanks to the ClearType full HD display.

My first reviewer is a 10-year-old boy and Man City fan called Daniel who has just done his 11 Plus. He straddles the worlds of old and new computing input paradigms, because his family has an iPad and a Windows 7 desktop. Daniel gets down to some obligatory streaming video and games play before I steer him towards typing in Word 2013. Interestingly, Daniel eschews the touch-screen keys despite my prompting, and sticks to the Touch Cover.

Verdict?

Surface Pro 2 keyboard and screen, photo; Gavin Clarke

Rich colours and a sharp definition on the Surface Pro 2 screen

“It felt nicer than a using a keyboard with keys that had to be pressed,” Daniel tells me, of the keyboard. He also liked the fact the keys light up in low light. “Cool,” he says. Any other pluses? Not really. Just the keyboard.

So much for hardware. Let’s talk software.

Surface Pro 2 is loaded with Windows 8.1, so the Metro Start screen is your home page. All apps are marshalled here with icons as different sized boxes and rectangles. Tap an icon and it flips 'round to open the app. Scroll down below the bottom of the screen and there's a full list of all apps by name. This is Windows 8.1 so you get the Classic desktop. An icon on the Metro Start screen takes you to a desktop with the familiar windows of folders.

First lesson of Surface Pro 2 is how to touch. You swipe up or in, depending on the function, starting from the black border around the screen. This is what BlackBerry did with its forgotten PlayBook.

The first hurdle is getting started and I need a Microsoft account before I can even use this machine. Each time it shuts down or suspends, I must enter a password to use it, and that password links back to the Microsoft account online. I need also accounts to use the really useful Microsoft icons on the Start screen - Skydrive and OneNote. Also, I need to subscribe to Office 365 to use the web versions of Office productivity apps even though the tablet comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote 2013.

I’m stuck in an exercise in backwards and forwards, of setting up accounts, of converting my Hotmail account, getting bounced between sign up and log in windows, of being told I don’t have the correct permissions to use Office 365 despite having just entered my credit card details.

Still, I’m in now.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note 2013 on Surface Pro 2 look as you know them on the PC, with the ribbon interface. But we do discover some concessions to touch on the tablet, and it's here things start getting tricky as the old and new worlds of desktop and tablet/internet meet.

The Office apps give you menu on the left-hand-side menu with a subset of options that include new, open, save, share and export. But what’s this: swipe the right-hand side of the screen and another menu swings into the screen with another sharing option – to share via email or OneNote.

Strangely, this option is grouped with a bunch of non-specific Office commands including Bing search and manage devices and PC settings.

The integration with other Microsoft apps is smooth: click the email share option from the right-hand menu and a window swings open taking up half the screen with a pre-composed email in your Hotmail account ready to go. Share from the right-hand menu, and I’m sharing using Outlook 2013.

I’m absorbing this, although not sure why I’ve got so many pre-programmed sharing options.

OneNote the web app is different again - actually better than the desktop app, OneNote 2013. But there is more confusion. No ribbon interface on the web app, unlike the Office family, rather the paradigm is pure touch. Tapping your finger on the screen gives you a wheel with icons for pens, paintbrushes, erasers and so on. Tap any of these again you get colours and different thickness. Then you draw with your fingertip or the stylus.

My daughter draws a self-portrait. Now, how to export it?

As in the Office 2013 apps, swipe on the right-hand side of the screen and I get the share option via Hotmail but I don’t want that – I want to download a version, to save and print, only there’s no download option.

Lost in the flow

After much poking and sliding, I find yet another export option. But it’s not on the left-hand-side of the screen as in Office, because that menu doesn’t exist. That space has been given over to a tree-like list of your notes, called Quick Notes. Instead, I happened to press my fingertip on the document’s name and a completely new menu pops up from the bottom of the screen. Who knew?

This menu comes with options including delete, copy link to page and pin to start. As an experiment, I paste the link into Gmail, but when I email it to myself I can only open the document in SkyDrive. Still now download option.

Even Google Drive lets you out of the Chocolate Factory occasionally by allowing you to download a document as a PDF.

I find this difference confusing and annoying. It’s forcing me to think about which application I’m using before I can do simple commands. I’m also beginning to suspect by not giving me a simple download option the whole Surface-Windows-8.1-setup is designed to benefit Microsoft rather than me.

This is a problem when you consider the Office and OneNote pack is supposed to be the last word in productivity software for Surface.

I’m not the only one feeling the pinch.

Daniel’s dad, Shaz, has been poking at Surface, too. He's another target customer for Microsoft on tablets: he's self-employed running his own business - a dental practice. He likes the endless horizontal scrolling of Metro – he reckons you can get more apps in and he says he likes Windows 8 overall. But he’s stopped in his tracks by the scrolling on IE, which – as we all know it is not horizontal like on Metro but is up and down. “You want to keep flipping one way and then you have to change to another way,” he says.

How is Surface Pro stacking up? This tablet is sharp and solid. Typing and screen resolution are both delicious. Stand-by time excellent. I like the snap of the keyboard and stylus into the magnetised ports, which have a heck of a grip.

Software is different: subtly different menus between productivity apps combined with hidden menus. Integration between Microsoft apps and services (like Word and Hotmail or Word and Outlook) is snappy. All I want is Microsoft, but not allowing me to easily download a non-Microsoft client is naughty.

Yes, some of this is just a matter of setup and acclimatisation. But it doesn't take much to alienate the undecided potential new user and lock-in thing is a constant. Microsoft is making the hurdle that little bit higher for itself.

Let’s talk Internet Explorer, Microsoft's other big app outside the productivity and different to what you're familiar with on the PC. Browsing was simple: tap the IE icon on Metro's Start page and you're in. Swipe up, from the bottom of the screen, and you get the URL bar and icons of open web pages. This is how the browser in BlackBerry's PlayBook worked.

But there were crashes - we lost the Wi-Fi on trying to resume from suspend mode. The error-message window was very informative and traced the problem when it came to the Wi-Fi, but getting cut off from the internet shouldn't have crashed the app.

Surface Pro 2 back, photo Gavin Clarke

Back to Surface: will a kick-stand make the difference?

There is one more reviewer, somebody who's pretty much Microsoft’s ideal Surface Pro customer: a power user, a white-collar professional called Alex and working in The City brokering technology investments and M&A.

Alex is man of spreadsheets, Word documents and presentations and Skype calls – handy given Surface Pro comes with a year’s worth of unlimited Skype calls to landlines. Alex is a multi-tasker who lives in tabs. If Surface Pro 2 is for the MacBook Pro user, then Surface Pro 2 is for Alex.

Alex takes a break from cooking lunch. He pokes and swipes at the Surface Pro 2, getting to grips quickly with Windows 8.1. Then he hands machine back to me. He used the weather app. The weather app? Is that it?

“I wouldn’t use it for business,” he concludes. Why not, I ask? “The screen is too small and I like a full-size keyboard.”

Surface Pro 2 is too tablet-like for this power user. “I don’t need another device,” he concludes before tossing the Surface back in my direction and returning to the kitchen.

So much for PC in the form factor of a tablet. Never mind being the most productive tablet ever and all that work on hardware and on software integration. Microsoft has got a PC that’s too small to be a PC and a tablet that is, well, just another tablet. Surface Pro 2 can't even get a foot in the door for Alex.

That is what lost mindshare looks like. ®