An extremely superficial review of Microsoft Surface
I was at Staples today and saw a Microsoft Surface (the tablet, not the big-ass table) demo unit, so I spent about ten minutes with it.
Yup, that’s accurate. (No idea who made it, but here’s where I grabbed it from.)
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Their demo unit was in the Desktop (classical Windows minus Start menu) view when I found it. Looks about the same as it does on a Windows 8 laptop. The desktop proper only had the Recycle Bin on it.
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As I’d figured out previously on a Windows 8 laptop, the Windows key on the keyboard switches in and out of the Start screen, which replaces the Start menu in previous versions of PC Windows with something a lot more like the Mac’s Dashboard.
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I tried two of the widgets, or whatever they’d call the things on the Start screen. The first was Games, which resembles the Xbox 360 dashboard (and even says “xbox games” at the top), set in the typographic theme of Windows 8.
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Of the half-dozen or so games listed there, most had the “Play” button disabled. The one that didn’t was “Angry Birds Space”, which gave me a barely-meaningful error message (something along the lines of “link not recognized; would you like to show this app in the Windows Store?”).
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When I launched Word and chose the Blank Document template, it displayed the document as ready to type into briefly, then showed some kind of tutorial dialog or something (I closed it without caring enough about what it said to read it, as I do with all such dialogs). Thanks for the interruption, Microsoft.
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Tapping on the screen instead of using a mouse feels more natural than I’d expected, although it helps having had a year and a half of training from the iPad. There’s no mouse cursor to be revealed by such actions, unlike past touch-screen versions of Windows.
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Word on the Surface feels like a simplified version, as Pages is on the iPad. But maybe there’s some progressive disclosure that I didn’t drill down into.
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Imagine typing on a Smart Cover. That’s about what typing on the Surface’s keyboard cover is like. You can feel some give underneath your fingers, but there’s no tactile feedback by which to know that the keypress has registered. For this reason alone, I can’t see myself adopting this as my daily driver for Real Writing as some have with the iPad + a Bluetooth keyboard.
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Once I got a little bit used to the keyboard cover’s key-feel, my accuracy was somewhere close to what I get on my iPad’s on-screen keyboard. Unfortunately, the Surface (or at least Word, at least however it was configured there at that moment) doesn’t have auto-correct like the iPad has, so my actual output accuracy was significantly lower.
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The biggest problem was insufficient keypresses causing missing characters. The iPad doesn’t have this problem, since a keypress is only insufficient if you miss the key outright.
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I didn’t attempt to detach the Surface from its keyboard cover, which might have been prevented for anti-theft reasons even if it is possible with sold units. Consequently, I don’t know whether there’s an on-screen keyboard for typing without the keyboard cover.
January 19th, 2013 at 18:18:36
Microsoft Surface does have an on-screen keyboard. I was watching Leo Laporte on TWiT showing off their new Surface and it was having issues with it not detecting the attached keyboard, so it was displaying the on0-screen keyboard for times when inputting text was necessary.
As for the mouse cursor thing. I’m pretty sure there is one. There is a trackpad area on the attachable keyboards so that you can move a mouse cursor around in the Desktop part of Windows RT. Mostly for using Office.
There is a better keyboard that has a feel similar to Apple’s aluminum keyboards. That keyboard costs $10 more than the “touch” keyboard, so I don’t really know why they don’t just give you the better keyboard instead of that crappy $110 touch keyboard.
Another problem you didn’t mention is that the 32GB version of Surface RT is actually only 16GB’s because the OS takes up the other 16GB! It’s not such an issue with the 64GB and 128GB versions since it’s less of a slice of the memory footprint.