PCA Forums

Okay, so I bought a Surface RT from GuardianAsher (don't mock me people!). I've always wanted to try one out. A few people know who have one love them, so I figure I'll document my experiences here.

First off, it is a lovely tablet. The build quality, fit and finish is excellent.

I like the very wide screen aspect ratio. It lets you read a web page in landscape mode comfortably, without resizing.

The magnetically attached power and keyboard connectors are brilliant. It would have been nice to have a standard micro USB port for charging, but I thing the current required is higher than 2amps.

There's a lot to like, but there are also SO many misses - minor things that Microsoft should have seen in testing. Why no magnetic sleep switch like every other tablet has? Instead of waking up by openning the keyboard/cover, you have to press the power switch.

Why is there even a classic desktop at all, when classic apps don't run on the RT? Why is there no other way to change the default search engine and home page in the tile based version IE except through the settings of the classic desktop version of IE? It's almost like two divisions in MS designed this thing, and neither talked to each other.

Most interestingly is how slow it is to update. Being that this tablet was factory refreshed to a pristine Win 8 install, I was going to upgrade to 8.1 but I was informed that I needed to install Windows updates first. Okay, so typical Windows on a fresh OS has 143 updates. I started the updates at 8pm last night. THEY ARE STILL INSTALLING now 12+ hours later. Its not the download, that took maybe 20 minutes, it's been installing updates all this time. And yes, I've Googled and this is a common complaint. I assume it's due to the low power hardware.

Granted, normal monthly updates won't take so long, but I still have to install Win 8.1 and then fully update that. How many normal non-techie consumers would tolerate that?

I've contemplated one for myself for a while. The lack of classic app support may have killed it for me though.

In my case I don't need much. I do 90% of everything I need to do on a tablet via the browser (not a fan of installing apps unless there is a REAL good reason to do so). There's a Kindle app for RT so I'm good with that. The only annoyance is that there's no SimpleNote app for RT (I use it for cloud shared notes) but I can access that via the web browser as well.

It's interesting to have the full featured capabilities of an IE browser in a tablet. Much as I love my Android tablets, some web sites just don't work properly on mobile browsers, irregardless of the browser (and I've tried them all). There's always tradeoffs.

I didn't think I'd the keyboard, but I actually do. It's way better than the touch keyboard on the screen and I find myself flipping it around when I need to type a long essay.

One part of the issue is with Flash. Android devices no longer support it, regardless of being in mobile or desktop view, they won't have all the functionality on some websites.

The specs on it isn't really that bad, it would serve as a decent Android tablet. Slow updates might just fall back in on memory usage or slow as hell wifi. Might be updates for that perhaps? Part of the issue might just be software optimization. Part of what some of the slow updates might actually correct.

It isn't the x86 platform, so there was bound to be performance issues. If you go solely on the specs of it though, nothing at all should be slow. If anything, it should be snappy with most anything you do.

Well the 8.1 upgrade went quicker than I thought it would, and the subsequent 45 Windows updates didn't take more than an hour, so maybe it was just cranky at first. Curiously, the tablet wakes up now when I open the cover.

8.1 added a lot of changes to the tile UI - more than I thought, and much appreciated. 8.0 managed bookmarks badly and it was awkward and unintuitive to edit them.

Overall I'm rather happy with it. it works as a really nice tablet. I like the option of a fully functional keyboard with touchpad, but I don't see myself using it much.

I do like the HUGE onscreen keyboard (because the tablet is so wide, it's very comfortable to type on). Takes a while to memorize the totally unintuitive finger gestures (obviously made that way to avoid stepping on Apple & Google patents I assume).

It's a pity that they were so late to the game. This is the tablet doctors really wanted a few years ago, but now most of the EMR companies have iPad apps.

Okay, the Surface is growing on me. Another nice feature I discovered is the ability to share to a specific email address. I wish Android would add this feature. I often send an email to myself from my phone or tablets, with a link to an interesting article. On most tablets that means several clicks: share button, click on email, then type in part of the contact name or look it up, and then send. On the surface you can just click on the share charm, and your most often used shares are displayed first. If those are emails, then you see your most often used email contacts. One click on the contact and send.

I also, like the bright screen. It's much brighter than any of my tablets or phone - easily readable outside. Pity the screen has a reflective finish instead of a matte finish.

I said before I like the big touch keyboard. They keys are huge and perfect for my fat fingers in landscape mode. I almost never mis-

My one lament - lack of an ad-blocker - I found a nice remedy for. There is actually a "tracking protection list" you can add to IE in Windows 8.1 that does the same thing, and works off the same list as AdBlocker Plus. I'll post info about that in a separate post. It greatly sped up page loading on a lot of the news and forum sites I read.

The built in news reader is quite good-as good as any of the news readers I use on Android, and even works better in some regards.