Buy NOW? Or Wait for Surface Pro 5?? - Surface Pro 4 Review
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
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watching guys that the video suck you
know what to do but if it was awesome
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video description also down there is our
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