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Buy NOW? Or Wait for Surface Pro 5?? - Surface Pro 4 Review

2017-03-22
a lot has changed in the last year Beyonce stuns the world with the release of her visual album lemonade Donald Trump stuns the world by packing his bags and moving into the house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and perhaps most importantly Microsoft slashed the price of the surface pro floor earning it after a year and a half to reach full maturity a spot in our review lineup so while the surface pro floor looks very similar to the three which is good it's possible they probable that the change is lurking under the hood are enough to make it very different from its predecessor which received a pretty tepid review from yours truly but are they enough to elicit a recommendation at the new lower price let's have a look so Tax GT x 1080 mini is extremely compact and powerful measuring just 8.3 inches in the length check it out at the link in the video description the surface pro floor feels really good in the hand it is reasonably light and as we've come to expect the overall build quality is fantastic the magnetic mount for the stylus is on the left now so you can have it clipped on while you charge the device and more importantly it is much stronger than the surface pro 3 under the hood there are more upgrades over the old model and while skylake CPUs have been on the market for 18 months now they still hold up surprisingly well given that Intel hasn't done much performance wise in that time so you should be able to find something that's right for you depending on how much you want to spend I think the sweet spot sits somewhere in the I 5 with 8 gigs of RAM range and i7 costs a lot more for a pretty small performance boost but you might find the core m3 equipped model a little sluggish in even day-to-day tasks like web browsing and PowerPoint creation and it doesn't include a surface pen one thing to watch out for make sure you buy the amount of RAM you need since it cannot be upgraded after which brings us back to the exterior the front camera is 1080p and is equipped with an IR emitter for Windows hello which is still amazing and there's also a 1080p rear-facing camera which is probably worse than whatever is on your phone at this point and one of my life rules is to never use the rear tablet camera anyway so we didn't spend much time on that on the right it has a mini DisplayPort port this is a huge plus for something that is at least on the surface a tablet so that can be easily adapted to HDMI DVI or even VGA for boardroom presentations but its 2017 and while it kind of kills me to say this a single USB 3 type-a port does feel a little dated and I hope that the Refresh features Thunderbolt 3 or at least USB type-c with the option to use it as a power input not that I'm asking for the magnetic power connector to go away another upgrade I'd love to see on the rumoured upcoming surface pro would be a full sized SD card reader instead of on micro I mean there's got to be enough space down there and those new 300 megabyte per second cards from Sony would make a great extra storage drive the screen on the surface pro 4 maintains the 2 by 3 aspect ratio of previous versions which sacrifices some real estate for widescreen aspect media consumption but with the average sounding speakers that clearly wasn't the primary focus for Microsoft and this aspect ratio is great for productivity and reading articles and it's full coverage of the sRGB color space and excellent viewing angles as well as out-of-the-box calibration means that it has stood up very well to the test of time just like the CPU Microsoft went for a suede feel on the keyboard cover that in spite of its binder like edge construction managed to really impress me the touchpad is understandably a little small but feel good with a satisfying audible click and the keyboard wow if I don't it was this good I'd have reviewed this when it was released the keystrokes felt good there's a fairly long travel and there's a satisfying click that I didn't expect from my experience with previous surface products I was able to quickly get up to speed and this entire review was typed on the surface pro for the backlight is also a nice touch on that subject as one of those weirdos who genuinely likes touchscreen devices it shouldn't surprise you that even in kick standed laptop mode that was one of the highlights for me of using the surface pro 4 in word you can easily highlight misspelled words and navigating in the browser is cake I mean other than that I was using edge to kind of have the full microsoft experience I know many people still think that laptops don't need touchscreens but I suspect many of them have just never used one regularly the included stylus is also one of the areas that Microsoft really stepped up on the surface pro 4 compared to the three writing notes in OneNote was easy and felt much closer to actually putting a pen to paper I could see this being extremely useful as a university student and it even inspired me to learn a bit about thermodynamics from one of our new writers a bit not much this is definitely a huge improvement over the previous versions with the only downside being that it occasionally picked up a palm while using the stylus opening up the notifications panel another area that the surface pro for impressed me with was the thermals of this little guy despite its super thin size it was able to keep the i7 and it's got nice and cool during our I 264 stress test stabilizing it at around 75 degrees while still turbo boosting to 3 gigahertz and as a bonus to actually state reasonably quiet to so who is this thing for then the tablet with a keyboard concept still won't be perfect for everyone and if you never plan to use the pen or fold back the keyboard a normal laptop like the LG gram or HP Spectre x-360 might make more sense but I will say this I genuinely regret not bothering to review this thing when it first came out because the fourth version of the surface is where the concept finally lives up to Microsoft's vision and if you can compromise on a somewhat dated i/o and you want something now today that's great for productivity tasks such as taking notes using word and surfing the internet at the new lower prices it's pretty killer I'm just excited to see how they follow it up maybe with a more timely piece of content this time have you ever heard of tunnel there well if you're a regular viewer you probably have but maybe today's the day you do more than just hear about it maybe you actually tried it super easy they've got apps for PC Mac iOS Android and even a Chrome extension and it's like one button you're just like BAM and your connection gets encrypted and you appear to the websites and services that you use as though you are browsing from a different country so all of a sudden you're you know John Doe from Timbuktu Wisden and that's the way you want it to be and tunnel there has a leading privacy policy and they do not log your activities so try it for free to find out if tunnel bear is right for you with five hundred megabytes of data included in no credit card required then when you decide to sign up for unlimited data you can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm slash LTT so thanks for watching guys that the video suck you know what to do but if it was awesome hit that like button get subscribe to our channel maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join
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