Do NOT buy the Surface Pro, wait for the helix.

Posted by james.ubc on February 28, 2013 04:44 am 226

I'll probably write a more lengthy/comprehensive post/review on the weekend but here's basically why I returned my surface in point and picture form:



1. The digitizer is terrible for anything outside of OneNote, has tracking issues randomly even while in direct contact with the screen. Tracking is especially bad on the corners. No wintab support

2. The reader app coruppts if it sleeps while unfocused. (happened on my replacement unit as well so I assume it's a software issue)

3. There are virtually no modern apps. I had about 5-7 installed but they went terribly great. Generally the apps are overpriced ($4.99 for angry birds) or just quick and dirty ports from android/iOS. Some of the apps are also gimped, (skype was updated this week but it's still pretty sad that it took so long).

4. My first unit broke after only about an hour of Path of Exile running in up-scaled 720p with lowest graphical settings

(ftr I own a physical copy of firefly/serenity, fox Y U CANCEL)

5. You CANNOT use it on your lap. If you do, the screen points directly at your navel, hardly a comfortable viewing angle. Touch cover is meh, Typecover is meh, would have preferred trackpoint to trackpad.

6. No Fn toggle mode. I honestly don't understand how they made it out the door without it. Does anybody on the surface team use Visual Studio!? Pressing a 2 or 3 key combination becomes incredibly stupid if you need to hold down the Fn key to hit a F key.

7. The fan is crazy loud (and pretty high pitched) when plugged in and running pretty much any desktop application. The sound itself isn't as bad as the noise it brings to the microphone though... the speakers were pretty awesome though, loved the sound...

8. The stylus feels like crap. It's a hunk of cheap, light, glossy, grease attracting plastic which is a pretty far cry from the rest of the device.

9. The hinge joint is uneven. Checked the store, all of them were like that.

10. 4gb of ram is pretty low for a $1000 dollar device I was swapping a fair bit and that impacted performance while multitasking.

tl;dr -- the surface has a ton of QA and design issues. Buy it if you live in One Note, but don't need to anotate PDFs in Reader; need desktop apps and only use your laptop on tables (when not browsing/in one note).

My original setup:

Update 0:

It appears many others are having similar issues