Surface review
Mood: excited
Posted on 2012-11-01 21:06:00
Tags: windows reviews
Words: 427

Well, it's been a week since I waited in line for 3 hours to buy a Surface, so it's about time for a review. Unfortunately it's been a busy week so I haven't had as much time to play with it as I would have liked, but here goes:

- The Surface itself feels very solid and light at the same time. I really wish it had wireless charging, but oh well. I've been using it throughout the day and it's been fine on battery life.

- The Touch Cover takes some getting used to (since the keys don't move), but I'm already typing pretty quickly on it - not quite as fast as a real keyboard but much faster than a virtual keyboard. (I'm typing this review on my Surface) I played with a Type Cover at the Microsoft Store today, and while it is a little thicker it felt exactly like typing on a real keyboard, so that might be worth the investment if you're going to be writing novels.

- The kickstand is nice although it would be nice if it could work at different angles. The kickstand itself feels very, very solid.

- The OS itself feels pretty fast and fluid, although some apps are a little laggy. The mail app in particular is really not that great and kinda slow. The store app can be a little laggy too. But overall I've been pretty happy.

- I haven't used the split screen view much, but I'm typing this while watching Netflix which is super awesome! Look here!

- The Windows Store is coming along - it still seems like new apps are being added at a good rate.

- Having Microsoft Office is really pretty handy, even if it's not totally designed for touch. The Skydrive service (Microsoft's version of Dropbox) and app are pretty handy as well.

- I got a free year of Xbox Music, which means I can download and stream a bunch of music for free. The app was acting a little funny earlier, but the idea is pretty cool and the selection is good. The speaker volume is acceptable but I wish it would go 15% louder.

- The Kindle app is fine enough, although following footnotes is surprisingly slow. The screen brightness makes it very pleasant to read on.

So all in all: two thumbs up! The hardware is eye-catching (I went with the cyan Touch Cover) and for the first few days people were stopping by at work to play around with it. I'm looking forward to travelling with it and seeing how it holds up

This backup was done by LJBackup.