

My review of the Surface Pro - bhauer
http://tiamat.tsotech.com/surface-pro-tip

======
corporalagumbo
"The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it
does. I am a little surprised to realize there is no preinstalled software
that transcribes handwriting into written notes nor does any Office
application do that."

I feel like hits on a big problem for Microsoft. They've come up with a whole
bunch of fancy new gizmos (Metro, Surface) - but it's all resting on top of a
mountain of random legacy cruft, and they haven't tied it together or done
anything really to iron out the weird inconsistencies. Great, here's a
brilliant pressure-sensitive pen. What? No, we haven't made anything for you
to use it with. Nope, sorry, no accommodations for it in the OS. Sorry man -
too busy coming up with crazy new shit (and slapping it onto small portions of
the interface)!

I'm using Windows 8 now, and, mixed with Windows Phone 7.5, Outlook.com,
attempts to integrate calendar and to-do lists, being forced to use the
monstrosity that is the Zune phone software, I have to say, holy shit
Microsoft - time to do some spring cleaning. I really hope instead of charging
on to the next big thing, Microsoft focuses on consolidation for Windows 9 -
delving in to all the random nooks and crannies, clearing out the legacy
cruft, unifying the interface, smoothing out the inconsistencies between Metro
and Desktop, streamlining their mobile-desktop integration, streamlining their
web services. Otherwise, god, how much longer can they go on coming up with
the new Next Bestest Thing to mash into the pile of random crap that Windows
has become?

~~~
stcredzero
_> The pen really has me confused. It would be awesome if it did more than it
does._

This reviewer is (admittedly) clueless about OneNote, which basically has its
own cult following. He also doesn't seem to be the kind to be heavily using a
"poor man's Cintiq." I look forward to a review from one or both of those
groups. Yes, a stylus is kind of niche. It's not exactly obscure, either,
though. I'd like to see reviewers go into detail about graphics and design
related programs.

~~~
bhauer
My wife used the original version of Onenote back in the day on her Toshiba
Portege tablet convertible. After picking up the Surface I called her up (she
was working on a Saturday, yuck!) to ask, "So, uh, does Onenote actually
recognize handwriting or what?" I described the silly assumption I had made
that Onenote might have a mode for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write
and she laughed at me.

Good thing the pen wasn't a chief deciding factor. I thought it would be
awesome. It's not.

Maybe in the future. The pen hardware seems solid.

~~~
gamblor956
_I described the silly assumption I had made that Onenote might have a mode
for transcribing handwritten notes as-you-write and she laughed at me._

OneNote, or more accurately, Office, does have this feature. I used it quite a
bit in law school on my HP TouchSmart tm2 (a tablet/laptop hybrid that comes
with a stylus and which predates the iPad). It's enabled in the Office
Language Settings bar/menu.

OneNote also has an OCR function which can convert images into text (but not
in realtime). It's only as good as the legibility of the image to be
converted.

~~~
bhauer
Are you referring to the black handwriting panel that you can switch to from
the virtual keyboard? If so, yes, someone else pointed that out and that's
nearly what I had in mind. I'm going to have to give it a test run to see if I
can use it efficiently enough.

That said, my delusional/fictional Onenote--the application I had in mind when
I thought, "Surface Pro pen + note application = awesome" was one that
converted text scribbled on the page into digital text in-place as I wrote.

It may end up being a mostly academic difference, of course. I look forward to
testing the black handwriting panel.

------
corporalagumbo
Wow, that background animation slowed my Firefox to a crawl. Works quite well
on Chrome though. Fancy stuff. HTML5?

Edit: Wow, actually a lot going on in this guy's site. The little animated
menus bottom left and right of the article. The filter searchable previous
posts. The swivel-transition topic group-changes. The speed-controllable
animation. Pretty neat, fanciest blog I've ever seen!

~~~
cabirum
Fully loads 1 core of my i7. Who the fuck makes things like this.

~~~
gala8y
Just wanted to post the same OT: i5 spinning at 3 GHz. No comment.

------
thomasbk
That background made the article unreadable for me. Both because it slowed
down the browser and scrolling, and because it was incredibly distracting.

~~~
stcredzero
The attitude made the article marginally readable for me. Both because it was
a bit incoherent, and because it was incredibly distracting.

~~~
tdicola
The use of 'datas' annoyed me. Data is already plural. The singular form is
datum.

~~~
apl
I'm assuming that, in this case, he was using it for comedic effect.

------
shin_lao
_How the heck do I close a Metro application? Do I even? Am I not really
supposed to? Is this a computer or a phone-like thing? This is a Surface Pro;
am I a professional or not? Do professionals close applications? Professional!
(Turns out I just mash function-alt-F4, which seems to do the trick, if a
little clumsily.)_

Just slide the screen with a finger from top to bottom to close an
application.

~~~
Ergomane
While you certainly can close Metro apps manually, there's no direct need in
terms of resources to do so. Metro apps will be suspended when not on the
foreground and removed from memory when free memory gets tight. When switching
back, the app is resurrected from the grave.

Such Jesus apps do depend on the developer not being lazy / retard. While MS
checks apps during the winstore certification process, sometimes apps slip
through that do not react to such events correctly. Using those apps is pretty
annoying.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I often need to force restart metro apps gone wild, and I do so in the task
manager (didn't know about the finger trick). These are first party apps like
Mail also (to be fair, I have to do this in iOS also, no app is perfect!).

~~~
brudgers
If you have two monitors, you can toss the whole Metro interface from one to
the other under Windows 8. It's efficient and effective.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I don't use metro much on my desktop, just laptop and surface RT unit. The
network sucks here in china, and most metro apps don't deal with it very well.

------
berkut
Anand's review: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-
rev...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro-review)

Intel's Core i5 really shows its power here compared to the ARM chips in the
benchmarks, but with the obvious downside of battery life. But when Haswell's
out, that should start to change as Intel get more aggressive on the power
usage side of things.

------
anonymoushn
Hi there. I couldn't find any email address (or indeed any about/contact page
at all), so I thought I would tell you here that scrolling on your blog is
completely broken. Also, if a user middle clicks a link, he or she probably
does not want the content to replace the current content.

~~~
bhauer
What device are you using to read it?

Middle-click should open in a new tab. Looks like a difference of behavior
between Firefox and Chrome though. Firefox apparently isn't sending a middle
click to the click handler on the anchor tag and I incorrectly assumed that
would be the case for all browsers. I'll get that fixed up.

Scrolling though?

And all the griping about the background is nearly convincing me to turn it
off by default.

------
jhspaybar
Any reviews out there that address how developer tool chains look? How does
Unity 3D do? How about Linux on a VM for web development work? Maybe even some
feedback on how something like nodejs running at the command line and serving
web requests for a dev environment looks?

------
hakaaaaak
Ok, a hypothetical. Valentine's Day coming up and my wife who is very non-
technical has (1) mentioned a surface in the last few months and she never
mentions things like that, (2) has developed a strong dislike for Apple (the
company) and has no desire for an iPad or iPhone, (3) was raised on PC's and
Windows and does not adjust to change in that regard. Let's say that she
already has a laptop that is relatively new, but she spends a lot of time on
the couch and doesn't take the laptop off the dock, and might enjoy having a
tablet next to her on the couch.

Now the question. Should I get her one, and if so, which one?

~~~
mikecane
You sure she'd like something that heavy? Why not a low-weight Android tablet
that can mirror her PC so she can do Windows without Windows on the tablet?

------
huhtenberg
I for one _want_ pen input, but under condition that it would allow me to rest
my hand on the screen. It should, basically, recognize the pen input
exclusively and ignore all other touch events, if I tell it to do so.
Sketching or writing all the while hovering your hand and ensuring it never
touches the screen is not exactly the pinnacle of convenience. If Microsoft
ever gets around adding this to Surface, they _will_ get an edge... but,
perhaps, by copying an idea from an HN thread :-)

~~~
MBCook
Doesn't the Surface Pro do that? I was under the impression that the pen on
the Pro used a Wacom mechanism, not just a $5 capacitive stylus like you'd use
with an iPad.

------
Andrex
> Most importantly, despite my obsession with PAO, that remains a figment of
> imagination. Harsh reality says that whether I like it or not, each device I
> own is an island. An island with an international airport, but an island
> nevertheless.

Sounds like a Chromebook might have been a better solution? Except he seems
biased against the laptop form factor for some reason.

Samsung ones even have matte screens.

~~~
bhauer
Yes, a little biased against the laptop form-factor. But mostly biased against
Google owning all my stuff for me. I'd rather I own my stuff and access it
everywhere without "synchronization" from my compute/data server. But that
might as well be science fiction.

~~~
Andrex
It's a browser so you can put as much or as little into Google as you'd like.

It sounds like you're just really looking for something like the dumb
terminals idea Sun was peddling years ago.

~~~
bhauer
Yeah, to an extent. Roughly that idea but with always-on broadband, high-DPI
touch screens, and shared, concurrent application state across all terminals.
I wrote more about what I'd consider ideal at <http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao>

------
eliben
I really, really fail to understand how this is not a super-expensive laptop,
essentially? Is it considerably smaller/faster than an ultrabook?

I'll grant that this is an interesting attempt at converging two devices, but
such attempts ultimately succeed or fail based on how well they can replace
either device. Would this thing replace your laptop? Your tablet?

------
jim_h
Where is the 8GB RAM version? Or the version with 256GB SSD? I would have
instantly splurged for 8GB, but old articles were wrong about it existing.

It's a great machine, but I want to be able to run applications that take more
than 4GB. VMware.. Photoshop..

(Admittedly it's nice to have a dedicated machine just for OneNote.)

------
kin3tic
Nice choice of jump drive. It's so silly but I love it, it's simple and
versatile. I've got it on a carabiner for easy access.

