With under a million sales for the Surface RT, Microsoft has their hopes that the Surface Pro will entice consumers to grab one. Unfortunately, it’s not getting good reviews and after our playing around with it, we can confirm it’s one of the worst tablets on the market.
The Pros:
Comes with a Wacom manufactured pressure sensitive stylus that attaches to the device which is very convenient. It also has a very nice display at 1080p with a 10.6″ screen, and running a full scale Windows 8 OS to edit photos and do some gaming along with typical low end laptop capabilities. It’s a solid built machine though in toughness just as with the Windows RT tablet.
It’s also fast, and very fast at launching apps almost instantly in comparison with the RT. It contains a Ivy Bridge i5 Processor which most laptops now do and is a big plus in it’s performance.
The Cons:
Where to start? The battery power is exceptionally worthless. Barely lasted around 4 hours, which is more than half of the iPad’s battery life, along with 3 hours less than the first Surface RT. It’s basically worse than most laptops as well on battery life, and has no means of ever replacing the laptop industry with this concept of a ultra thin keyboard and touch display. You will find yourself plugged in, and not mobile with this device. Guaranteed.
The size is bulky, heavy, and just simply fat. Luckily there is a metal kickstand that keeps it upright on a table or desk so you don’t have to hold it with your hands. If people strain to hold a iPad, they won’t even want to bother lifting the Surface Pro up for a minute.
The storage space isn’t much to brag about either with the Surface Pro. The “64″ GB offers 30GB of free space for the user, and the “128″ GB offers 90GB of free space to the user. All the other tablets offer almost full capacity to the user which makes the selling point of this tablet slump dramatically for the money you shell out.
While t he keyboard/trackpad is essential to have for it’s use, it continued to frustrate us as we played around with the device for a while. It wasn’t responsive much to some touch factors, and you find yourself pressing the keys harder than you would on most if not any keyboard before. If you like to pop open your tablet and check for new notifications or write a quick email, you won’t find yourself doing much of that at all with this device.
The camera is even more of a disappointment to us as well. Even in a well lit room the 720p cameras were filled with digital noise. They seemed to have done the typical consumer focus and concentrated on the megapixels, and forgetting the more important censor which can’t manage contrast for the life of it. Images came out too dark or just washed out if any light fixture was in play.
Overall with our couple of hours of playtime that we had with the Surface Pro we agreed on a 1.5/5. Lack of free space capacity, bulky design, weight, poor camera quality, still bad keyboard and bad battery life will give you nothing but frustration. Despite a nice display, extremely fast and being just as tough as the Windows RT we can’t help but give a poor score for it’s lack in ability to keep up with the current tablet market.
The Microsoft Surface Pro launches February 9th starting at $899 for 64GB and $999 for the 128GB. Tack on a additional $119-$129 for the type and touch cover.
