Surface Pro 4

[Dan]

Mine has arrived.

Absolutely love it. Incredibly small and light - a tiny bit thicker and heavier than my Nexus 10, but not by much - especially considering the power it has available. The whole thing is incredibly well put together - very solid, almost entirely metal and glass, and just generally a pleasure to hold. The screen is incredible. Really bright (almost uncomfortable at the brightest setting), bright and vivid colours, and the sharpness is fantastic. Makes my (really very good) 1080p Dell screen look like a sack of shit. The power is fantastic too - I can play CS:GO quite comfortably on mine, and it munches through some complex data processing stuff not much slower than my 2500k equipped desktop.

The main negative is that the experience isn't quite polished enough yet. The first 6 hours were marred by updates, reboots, and long periods of staring at a progress bar moving up by 1% every five minutes before Windows would boot. Windows proper isn't that touch friendly (especially if you turn the display scaling down to make things smaller), and the popup keyboard isn't as good as it's Android equivalent. However, being able to run full Windows apps on what it is entirely fair to call a tablet is remarkable.

[Ekona]

Nice write up, cheers dude

Do the negatives of the experience frustrate a lot, or is it just more of a niggle?

[Dan]

No, not really. I think MS have some work to do on refining the experience a bit, especially given how popular Apple laptops are becoming at the moment. Once you're past the initial setup it all works very well. Also found the tablet mode, which makes everything a bit more finger friendly, and makes the onscreen keyboard pop up automatically when you enter a textbox. Main problem is that the window you have open doesn't resize when the keyboard appears, meaning the keyboard can sometimes cover the text box you're typing into. The keyboard can be moved so not the end of the world, but a minor irritation.

Overall very pleased with it. Windows Hello is incredible. It's basically face unlock, but it works very quickly and accurately - far better than the Android phone implementation does.

[Ekona]

Lovely, thanks bud. What spec did you go for in the end?

[Dan]

Went for the i7 with 256GB storage and 8GB of RAM.

Am planning to use for a bit of casual gaming (e.g. games of CS with my brothers when we're all home for Christmas etc) and wanted to have the more powerful integrated graphics that come with the i7 version. If it weren't for that I'd have gone for i5, and the M3 probably would have been more than adequate!

[Tinlad]

Can you use it as a laptop... on your lap? Or do you need a surface (ha?) to place it on when you're using the keyboard case thing?

I'll quietly admit that (if I were to be upgrading) there's something about the Surface Pro that appeals to me more than a MacBook Pro.

[Dan]

With keyboard and stand it's very 'lappable'. Not quite as stable as a normal laptop, mainly because they keyboard bounces a bit. It's certainly not unstable or at risk of slipping off. On a stable surface the keyboard is as good as a decent laptop keyboard with slightly reduced key travel. I can type at full speed on it easily.

[Tinlad]

Cheers for the answer.

Looks like a lovely bit of kit. Enjoy!