Microsoft Surface - We Go Hands On [UPDATE: Detailed Impressions]
by Vivek Gowri on June 18, 2012 11:32 PM ESTPost-announcement, Microsoft took us to a backroom in Milk Studios to give us hands on experience with the Surface. They weren't lying, even the preproduction units feel awesome in hand. The magnesium panels are finished with partial vapour deposition, a process that deposits a thin-film coating onto the panel using vacuum deposition (molecule-by-molecule deposits at sub-atmospheric pressure.) It gives the unit a distinctly premium feel, and one that's pretty different from most of the other metal-bodied systems out there particularly with the current trends towards anodization and brushed finishes. The body is 9.3mm thick (a tenth of a millimeter thinner than the latest iPad), and total weight comes in at 676g (or about 1.49 lbs), so it's denser feeling than the iPad.. The 31.5Wh battery isn't as large as the iPad's 42.5Wh, but the 1366x768 10.6" LCD definitely draws less power.
The hinges in the kickstand are spring-loaded, giving a very positive mechanical feel and noise. The hinge mechanism is particularly robust, and as mentioned in the keynote, was acoustically tuned to sound high quality. Microsoft seemed particularly OCD about certain design details, this being one of them. It paid off though, with a hinge that looks and feels ready to take a lot of abuse. The stand props the system up at 22 degrees, which is a common theme - the beveled edges are all angled at 22 degrees, and the rear camera is also angled at 22 degrees in the opposite direction. This is a pretty interesting one, since it means you can keep the tablet angled as is usually comfortable, and still shoot video straight ahead. It's a good idea, though probably one that will take a bit of adjustment in real life use.
My personal favourite part of the Surface is the cover. There's two of them - the Touch Cover, and the Type Cover, both with integrated keyboards and touchpads. The Type Cover has a traditional keyboard, albeit one with particularly shallow feel, along with physically clicking mouse buttons. The Touch Cover is very interesting - it has a pressure sensitive membrane keyboard with felt keys and mouse buttons housed in a cover that's totally 3mm thick. (The Type Cover is ~5.5mm thick). I wasn't able to get a feel for how typing actually feels on it, so I can't comment on responsiveness or accuracy, but our friend Ben Reed at Microsoft Hardware swears he can top 50 words per minute on it any given day. I'm inclined to believe him, but I can't comment firsthand until I can actually play with a working unit.
The outside of the covers is covered in a felt material, and when closed, the unit feels like one of the velour or felt-covered journals. It gives a decidedly organic, natural feel to a very inorganic device, something that Microsoft was very pleased to note. It's a pretty awesome idea, actually, taking the best parts of Apple's Smart Cover and ASUS' laptop dock and merging them together into one of the most innovative cases we've seen. I took away three major things from this event, and the only one them that directly related to the device hardware being shown off was that integrating the keyboard into the cover was a stroke of awesome. (I'll go more in depth on the others in a larger post later today.)
For the first time, I can really see a tablet replacing a notebook as my primary computing device. Before today, I couldn't say that with any real conviction - I tried it with the iPad on multiple occasions, and it just didn't work. I'm a writer, tablets aren't ideal for writing. Surface changes that in a big way. And that's really what Microsoft is going for here - a device that fits into your life as a versatile tool to do anything you want it to. Whether they'll succeed in capturing the market is a story that will be told after Surface launches alongside Windows 8 later this year, but for now, this is a very promising start.
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r19578 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link
felt like surface traps dirt and hard to clean, while leather is much easier to clean.Mumrik - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link
We (won't) meet again.It makes no sense to me. Tablets are media heavy devices, why not hit 720P straight or go high like the competition? It's the same nonsense as bottom of the barrel discount HDTVs.
B3an - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link
1366x768 is the minimum res needed for all the Metro features to work. No Win 8/RT tablets will be lower than that res. And i'd rather have 1366x768 than 720p any day.mset - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link
I read through all the comments. I never post in this section but decided to give you guys a view from a pure consumer. I'm not really a tech guy at all.1. My Mom uses the iPad as her primary computer - that is, she uses it for email and surfing the web. There are a ton of people out there who need this and only this, and for them, the tablet is going to be their primary computer going forward. Everyone who talks about 'productivity' is a member of a very small minority of retail users.
2. My Mom couldn't care less about aspect ratio/fine distinctions in resolution. There will be millions of people whose decisions will be driven by price point, and fine distinctions in resolution won't matter.
3. I hate the fact that I can't use an iPad to surf the internet. Okay, okay... that's kind of melodramatic, but you know what I mean. If I go to a webpage and I can't load it because I need Flash to run the video, I can't use that tablet. My Mom hates this too but puts up with it. If there's a tablet that will allow her to view any content she wants, she would switch in a heartbeat. Only you guys know if 'HTML 5' or whatever the Flash alternative is will be in widespread us in the next xx years.
4. A lot of the comments here seem to be missing out on the main point - MSFT seems to be taking a page out of AAPL's successful playbook (Sorry, RIMM). That's what they're going for, and to me the lower priced RT version will be the one aimed at AAPL's core, to the extent that either of these units are aimed there. Again, 75% of the comments here which posit a failure by MSFT in this effort point to the screen and its resolution. I just don't believe that this is going to be that huge an issue for Joe and Jane Average.
5. MSFT *knows* that $1000 isn't the price point that's going to bring them the kind of widespread market penetration that the iPad enjoys. They know this... don't they? I mean, they must. I see this as the first shot in a long game. In a sense, this is MSFT trying to reinvent itself. Time will tell if they're successful.
6. That integrated keyboard/cover looks cool to me.
drwho9437 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link
They will sell this thing at their cost or if they do so legally at a loss. Even though Apple has a large market cap people still think of one of the most closed companies in the world as saintly and MS as evil. But as the HP tablet proved if the price is right people will flock.Establishing a user base is more important than profit. Particularly for the ARM Window RT where the is no legacy applications to fall back upon.
I'm sure it is great device, but it needs to be better than Apple and lower cost than Apple is likely to match. Apple has very deep pockets so it could survive a price war quite well.
If I were MS I would wait until I had pretty good volume have a low intro price that makes that volume just sell out without too massive a backorder.
I'll never understand who the biggest company by market cap is still the cool guy (and biggest by market share in music and tablets), we are suppose to be pulling for the underdog, for competition and in this case it is MS and Google strangely enough.
Belard - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - link
None of them are underdogs. Those 3 are about control, period... Sell your soul to MS, Google or Apple... there isn't much difference, so get the best of what you like.Examples of underdog (not the cartoon): RIM, AMD, Amiga, Opera, Libre Office.
mutatio - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - link
I'm not really impressed with the look of it. I would expect quite a bit more out of what was supposed to be such a major announcement. The keyboard cover is an interesting twist on Apple's covers. With that said, I can't imagine a whole lot of use being made out of the membrane based keyboard for any so called "serious work," which is what nerds are proclaiming this device to allow. The more traditional KB cover bumps up the thickness of the cover and easily moves this right into iPad+KB+stand case territory, which defeats the whole purpose of launching a supposedly ground breaking awesome tablet device. Having a high end clicking sound in your hinge doesn't mean it's not an industrial design disaster waiting to meet the real world. I'm sorry, the hinge is just plain dumb and MS will have a host of pissed off users with snapped off stands that effectively ruin their investment in an otherwise functional tablet. That's just so obvious it's effing ridiculously stupid.I'm still hoping MS makes some serious tweaks to the W8/RT OS. As it is, it still makes me want to gouge out my eyes. The OS metaphor makes sense from a touch based standpoint and I think MS is trying to be too slick in their efforts to have everything relate back to the touch interface. e.g., Just wait for a general consumer to be all psyched about a tablet, with KB and mouse/touchpad, and the latest Windows OS, only to find they can't operate in the usual windows environment for basic functions like shutting down, sleeping, etc. I'm open to having my mind changed when I see these in person but I continue to think that this will be a bag of hurt for MS. I do appreciate the touch based side of the OS but believe it is a clumsy and heavy handed approach to trying to integrate the touch and traditional elements of MS's operating systems. Only time will tell, however.
fteoath64 - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - link
MS seems to see a dire need to go into hardware just to push Win8 in a big way. I can see this with RT but for x86 legacy, it is just a minor evolution of the OS with a horrible looking UI at that.The hope was that RT could evolve to be different to X86 Win8 just for the more fact, that MS *can* afford to support to codebases as they have done more than 4 in the past!. On the Arm platform, there can be a lot of optimizations in time to bring their OS (maybe Win8 SP3) to a reasonably useful way to really compete with Android 5.x. As for ICS competition, I think they would be really lucky to even get 10% of the Android market much less a fair slice of the IOS market. From some of the sales data, we have seen some erosion of IOS sales due to lower priced Android devices.
I think the Win8 Pro devices here will do well in the market just because they are a niched premium ultrabook with most of the trimmings (and some of the compromises). Only a detailed review will allow a proper comparison for buyers to choose. Good luck MS, nice to see you emulate Apple once again. This time without Jobs screaming at you.
fteoath64 - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - link
Look at photo 2 with the kickstand open, the edges of the cover is NOT even above the 4 torque screws. The gap towards the right end is almost 3mm wide!. The cover panel is not even a perfect straight edge!. That is not the result of precision engineering.Maybe they can fix that in the final product.
So no talk about battery life seems to indicate "bad news" on that aspect. At least for RT models, it would be decent. Ivy bridge models will have a hard time doing 4 hours.
But that will pass ok for standard slim laptop users. Real tablet users needed 7 hours at the least!.
rickcain2320 - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link
Or are you stick in widescreen mode?