*** The Official Microsoft Surface Pro Thread ***

Rilot

Rilot

Rilot

Don
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
23,812
Location
Wargrave, UK
Surface Pro info is getting lost in the Surface RT and Generic Windows 8 tablets threads so let's consolidate it in here from now on.

So, first review is up at Ubergizmo and is pinning the battery life at 6hrs of productivity and 5hrs of local viseo playback. That's good enough. http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/02/microsoft-surface-pro-review/

C|Net review: http://reviews.cnet.com/microsoft-surface-pro/

Release date in the US and Canada is 9th February but so far no release date for other markets has been announced.

I shall be ordering one as soon as I can.
 
Last edited:
They are all pinning it in the 5 to 6 hour range which is enough. Ultrabooks aren't much better than that and I see this device as an ultrabook replacement rather than a tablet replacement.

There does seem to be an awful lot of hate for this device from commentors on those reviews. The reviews themselves seem pretty well balanced but the comments from people are just absolutely slating (excuse the pun) it. I'm not sure why.

The objections I see are:

Too expensive compared to iPad: It's a full PC and should be compared to ultrabook pricing.
Bad GPU: It's good enough and can push a lot more pixels around than all ARM based tabs at the moment.
Crap for productivity: I guess people have never heard of network docking. Connect to a USB hub and a nice 22" screen and you have a workstation.
Not enough storage space: This I can sort of agree with from some angles. 128GB is a little on the low side for a full Windows machine but are you really going to keep your entire iTunes collection on it?

It fits my usage profile nicely so I will definitely be getting one. I can see though that most people would be better off with an iPad.
 
Last edited:
cu3ed said:
It drives me nuts they cannot see what this tablet is able of doing and still they go at it with the though that this is JUST a tablet akin to the likes of iPads etc, its not, its nothing like them, its an UltraBook in a tablet form factor, so maybe an UltraTablet?
Talking about the battery life is a mute point, Engadget complain it "only" got near 4 hours of a constant video played though it, id say that was bloody impressive!
Click to expand...

That's more than enough for what I need. For me, it will replace my laptop for day to day use.
For me, something that I can use as a tablet when I want to, is small enough to fit in a small shoulder bag and has enough battery power to last me most of the day is what I need.
 
It would be nice if they just gave us an approximate time frame. Soon could mean anything from next month to late this year.

You have to hand it to MS, they really aren't very good with product launches at the moment.
 
Glaucus said:
The whole windows 8 launch on tablets has been a fiasco. There's still **** all available be it rt, atom or I-series.
Click to expand...

Yup. We have a few overpriced Atom tablets from HP, Samsung and Acer and a couple of i5 tablets and convertibles. Getting hold of any of them, let alone actually trying one out in store is pretty difficult.

Apple and Google must be laughing their behinds off.
 
MS just updated their blog to say:

"Surface Pro will be coming to the UK in the coming months" .......months.... MONTHS??? C'mon, this is silly. By the time we get it, at this rate there will be Surface 2 on the horizon.
 
Run some games on it and report back please.
WoW if you have/play it would be interesting from my perspective.

Also, a tip I learned from another forum is to replace the MS Intel HD4000 driver with one from the Intel website. It fixes game scaling issues and is much faster.
 
The touch cover on my RT definitely has a UK layout with " above 2 and @ and ' to the right of ; and :
The US covers will have a US layout with no £
 
Martini1991 said:
and then we're 40 quid more expensive than an i3 Ivy and X86 Touchscreen Windows 8 laptop, so that's a none starter.
Click to expand...

And this is the key issue.
I was in a PC shop the other day when I chanced upon an HP Envy X2 (Atom 2GB tablet with dock). It was sat next to an Asus ultrabook on the display. The Asus was not only £100 cheaper but was sporting an i5 chip, 4GB RAM, a touch screen and a 500GB HDD.

Now, when you put things like that in front of a customer, they are going to buy the Asus.

The pricing of Win8 tablets is all wrong. The Samsung Ativ PC Pro is over £1200. The Sony Vaio Duo is £1000 and the Surface Pro is going to be around the £700 mark. Those products can justify their prices (maybe not the Samsung) because of their good specs. The Atom devices just cant.
 
Trig said:
Anyone decided they arent going to bother with the Pro yet, I'm tired of waiting tbh...
Click to expand...

If it's released in the next 4 weeks I'll get one.
If not, I'll go with my original plan and get a Macbook Air or a Samsung ultrabook.
 
techmob said:
Are these available in the uk now?

Spoke to softcat and they said they can get them but won't know price till Monday

Anyone know, if available and price?
Click to expand...

Nope.
No announcement, no price.

Personally, I don't think they will come to the UK at all. It's been too long since launch.
 
Gah. If only they had released it at this price back in January I'd have had one. Now, I don't see the point. There are lots of other interesting devices coming out now and hopefully, the Pro's pricing will cause other manufacturers to drop theirs in the UK.
 
Now we've seen Haswell's launch and the potential power savings therein, I've decided to wait for the next version of the Surface Pro. I still have my RT for Office use and that keeps getting better and better with every update.
 
Well, I caved and bagged one on Saturday along with a type cover. I figured, even if MS announce a Haswell version at Build this week, it's going to be tied to the Win 8.1 launch in October and probably won't make it across the channel until 2014 anyway.

I have to say, I really love the device. The type cover is really nice and much better than the touch cover. Battery life isn't great but we knew this. Getting about 4.5hrs.
 
[RXP]Andy;24509944 said:
I'd recommend changing the settings when on battery, to limit CPU usage to 75%. This prevents the device from going into turbo mode on a single threaded application. Its made a huge difference on battery life for me. I regularly get over 5 hours now on mine.
Click to expand...

I've done this.
I got about 4 hours total runtime yesterday but that was with me installing lots of programs, syncing up my (large) SkyDrive folder and not letting it sleep.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom