W.A.Khan, 26/4/2013, Making your mind up about the Surface Pro is less about what it is and what it does and more about what you want out of a tablet. As a hybrid PC it's an undeniable compromise - but that's no bad thing. The Microsoft Surface Pro fits a full ultrabook experience in a compact 10-inch tablet. Thanks to the ingenious Type and Touch covers, it offers a comfortable interface and typing experience. The clean, crisp design and sharp 1080p screen rise above the competition.
But, The battery life is disappointing, and more ports would be nice. The 64GB model barely has any free storage. It costs as much as a regular laptop, especially because the cool keyboard cover isn't included by default. software ; For the full low-down on Windows 8 read our Windows 8 review. For the Surface Pro suffice to say that it offers the full no-holds-barred Windows 8 Pro experience. So you can run any software that you have installed on any other Windows device, as well as Windows apps. That means you can run Office on your tablet, making the Surface Pro a more than useful travelling companion for business people.
Display; The 10.6-inch display is small, especially for a full Windows laptop, but it's crisp and bright and has a full 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. I found myself able to work on it easily, but I could also see that you'd want to plug in a monitor for all-day use. The good news is that the Surface Pro supports up to 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution on an external display. Even if you didn't use another monitor, the Surface's IPS display is one of the best I've ever seen on a small Windows computer. Capacitive multitouch feels buttery-smooth. That's the magic that made the iPhone and iPad so fun to use. The Surface Pro, in painting programs and a few other apps I tried, felt comfortable to navigate. It's not quite as brilliant as the iPad's Retina Display, but it feels like it's getting spiritually close.
You can connect the Surface to a larger monitor easily; many will. A built-in Mini DisplayPort carries audio and video, and with adapters (sold separately) you can switch over to VGA or HDMI if needed. Working in multimonitor mode operated exactly the same as you'd expect on a Windows PC. It took some fiddling to get window sizing just right, but I found that working on my desk with the innocuous Surface on the side of my monitor as a PC-slash-second-screen was a bit of a treat. Performance; As you'd expect from a Core i5 Ultrabook that just happens not to have a permanent keyboard, the Surface Pro is fast. It boots in about six seconds, and takes the same time to resume from hibernation once you add that to the power menu.
When running Photoshop and applying complex filters, editing 15GB raw images in Lightroom, rendering HD videos in Premiere Pro, watching 450 fish swimming at 60fps in the FishIE benchmark, the Core i5-3317U in the Surface Pro shows its speed and power.
You'll have no problem transcoding audio and video, running Visual Studio or using modelling and CAD software.
If you've used one of the very latest Core i5 processors, you know what sort of performance to expect from the Surface Pro. If you've used one of last year's Core i5 notebooks, the Surface Pro is definitely faster. Surface Pro: pen; The Surface Pro comes with a pen that offers a drawing and writing input for the tablet. It's a passive device that doesn't draw power and attaches magnetically to the side of the device. According to Microsoft the Surface Pro's pen offers 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity and it's true that it is a very sensitive tablt pen. In use it can be laggy however, and it feels flimsy and plastic - if you're spending this much money on a tablet you want premium quality, and the Surface Pro's pen doesn't feel like that at all.
The pen does offers a certain amount of useful functionality, however. In essence it's useful when you need a drawing pad, and pointless at all other times. And sitting on the side of your Surface Pro it can feel a little in the way. Battery life; If only the Surface Pro had excellent battery life. It doesn't. In our video-playback battery drain test, the Surface Pro lasted 4 hours and 31 minutes, regardless of whether the Type Cover was connected or not. That's not far off from some other high-powered 11- and 10-inch ultraportables, but it's a big step down the 6-hour mark on many ultrabooks. The Acer Iconia W700 lasted more than 7 hours despite having a similar processor. Intel's newer processors coming later this year should result in a more battery-efficient Surface Pro at some point. As it currently stands, the Surface Pro can last you a good chunk of a day, but you'll need to monitor battery life and keep that sleek charger handy (which, incidentally, has its own extra USB charge port for accessories or phones). This qualifies as fair-enough battery life, but disappointing compared with other tablets -- though not totally surprising. Price;$899.99 Finally, The Surface Pro's gutsy design successfully reinvents the Windows 8 laptop by cramming an ultrabook experience into the body of a 10-inch tablet. Those wanting to go all-in on the tablet experience won't regret buying the Surface Pro, but we're holding out for a future, more polished generation of the device.
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