Microsoft Surface 2 Review: The Surface 2 almost succeeds to appropriate your laptop and your tablet. According to ZDNet review, good performance, battery life, and a solid but stylish design are the machine's strength however it is dragged down from greatness by some minor cons.
Browsing the web is easy. Internet Explorer sits smack in the middle of the Window 8 Start screen and loads just about instantly. Navigating web pages feels fast and responsive and, coming from Chrome and being unfamiliar with Internet Explorer it is unswerving to switch between tabs bring up frequently visited sites and other bread-and-butter browsing tasks.
Videos look vibrant and crisp on the 10.6-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 screen, while the stereo speakers are loud enough to be audible in moderately noisy environments without distorting at high volume. Front and rear video cameras make the Surface 2 a good choice for video calls and shooting the occasional video or photo. The screen's clarity also made the tablet a decent choice for reading lengthy documents although the matte display of an e-reader would be preferable for e-books.
Performance in general is very good. The machine's combination of 1.7GHz quad-core ARM-based Nvidia Tegra 4 processor, 2GB of memory and Flash storage allows it to switch between multiple apps, and between the Start menu and the desktop, without slowing down.
The Surface 2's increased nippiness doesn't come at the expense of the battery life. Nine hours of work, a mix of word processing and web browsing, before the battery died was enough to last through the day. This was borne out from estimated battery life by measuring the (fully charged) system's power draw under different conditions (screen brightness and load), dividing the resulting wattages into the battery's 31.5Wh capacity (Wh/W=h). Our estimates ranged between 16.4h (idling at 25% brightness) and 2.6h (running a demanding load at 100% brightness), giving a mid-point of 9.5h.
Windows 8's tile-based Start menu directs to navigate and rapidly picks up the various touch gestures that allow you to swap between applications and the Start menu.
Touch works less effectively on the desktop. The desktop is a home to Microsoft Office (2013 RT) and using it is inevitable.
After using Office on the desktop for a prolonged period with only the on-screen keyboard and touch, typing and menu navigation may be difficult, particularly when clicking on tiny icons.
According to Nick Heath's review, desktop apps were far more usable with the Type Cover, a super-slim keyboard that doubles as a cover for the tablet's screen. Writing with a Type Cover isn't as easy or comfortable as using a decent laptop keyboard.
The downside is that the Type Cover isn't included in the Surface 2's asking price of £359 (inc. VAT; £299 ex. VAT): a Type Cover 2 costs an additional £109.99 (inc. VAT; £91.66 ex. VAT), while the slimmer, pressure-sensitive Touch Cover 2 costs £99.99 (inc. VAT; £83.32 ex. VAT). The cheapest add-on keyboard you can get is the first-generation (non-backlit) Touch Cover, which costs £64.99 (inc. VAT; £54.16 ex. VAT)
The main issue with the Surface 2 was the selection of software on offer. The Surface 2 runs on Windows RT 8.1, a version of Windows 8 customised to run on an ARM-based processor.
The Start menu comes loaded with a video and audio player, Skype, as well as news, weather, photos, sports and finance apps. However, it didn't have the apps most users wanted: it has Xbox video and audio player rather than VLC, SkyDrive (now OneDrive) rather than full Dropbox, and Spotlite instead of Spotify, for example. The quality of these alternatives varies, but the Surface 2 is at a disadvantage when it's competing against platforms that already have many of these apps.
The Windows Store is a relative newcomer compared to the app stores for Android and iOS, so the breadth of apps will likely improve, so long as developers see a suitably large user base.
