Surface RT review by PCMag: Analysis and discussion

Posted by mzwash on October 23, 2012 06:59 pm 2

As I'm sure many of you have seen, PC Mag prematurely released their review of the Surface tablet. After reading the review, along with several other Win8 and WinRT reviews, I thought it would be important to discuss what can be learned from the new insight.

One of the things that confused me was the lack of meaningful insight into the ecosystem that WinRT is part of.

More importantly, there are certain features that detract from the score of the Surface but do not detract from (or appear at all in) reviews of other tablet/transformer products. In specific to the PC Mag review, cons like proprietary charging, decreased ability to type on a non flat surface and a lack of backwards compatibility appear as detractors.

Do you think The Verge will give a fair and thorough treatment to the Surface? Will they differentiate between scores that are derived solely from the Surface and those that use other products as a baseline? If other products are used to rate the Surface, will this relative assessment appear on the review pages of those projects?

Please read the comments listed below the links for a fairly comprehensive review of what should be considered when assessing the "ecosystem" of the Surface. Originally made by user mechacrash on the Vivo RT review page.

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Personal gripe
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- It almost seems to me that there needs to be a re-vamping of the scoring system to account for relative ratings and a litmus test for what metrics a product is eligible to be rated upon.

- Why the heck did they post the highest possible price? They could have at least said "Starting at $499" instead of "MSRP $699"



The PC Mag review was taken down but there is a cached version from Google available here:
Page 1 [edited by Dieter for formatting]

Page 2: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411252,00.asp

Page 3: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411253,00.asp

Page 4: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Awww.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411254,00.asp





From user mechacrash :

Devices: The improved WDDM allows drivers for almost any USB, web, or standard connected device straight out of the box. We’re talking about screens, printers, scanners, external storage, keyboards, mice etc.

Connectivity: The exact same connection stack as the Desktop counterpart including the sharing features with xbox (smartglass) and windows phone (companion). The extent of which we haven’t even finalised, it’s only likely to improve.

Hardware flexibility: The choice of multiple OEMs and peripherals and standard ports compliance. This is unmatched on that form factor.

Services: Native applications include the Xbox Music and Video applications which not only make suitable touch based players for your personal media, but also have features such as free streaming for audio, content renting and purchasing, subscription features, etc.

OS Integration: The metro code-base (WinRT) is supported on all the new platforms, namely; Widows Phone 8, Windows 8 and the aforementioned Windows RT. This essentially means that cross compatibility is not only supported, but it is default. This isn’t like iOS upscaling phone apps for the iPad, this is the same experience on all platforms with hardware advantages and all.

Others: Skydrive integration for cloud based services (your entire account is mapped online so logging into another, completely separate, windows 8 / RT device will bring all your documents and everything with you. Office RT supports this and is included as it comes.