Gadgetory

welcome to my much-awaited I hope unboxing and first look at the surface from Microsoft this is a ten point six inch tablet and recommends represents Microsoft's first foray into their own branded hardware so I actually went to the Microsoft Store and bought this today if you follow me on Twitter then you already know that there was a bit of a lineup but I had like a reservation thing I got the kit that comes with the touch cover and the Windows RT tablet I got a 32 gig surface remember a 32 gig surface has a Windows operating system installed on it so even though it's 32 gigs you don't actually get really that close to 32 gigs of actual storage on your surface tablet because the Windows OS is a little bit bigger than we're used to seeing from something like an Android or an Apple mobile operating system so inside I have the surface box itself here and then I've also got a separate box that has the touch cover so touch cover is one of the biggest innovations that Microsoft has really brought about with surface and that it's a nice little kind of suede II cover that's actually quite nice Wow feels really dense like it's a like it's the material that's not just gonna kind of crap out after a little while and then the keyboard itself which is a touch sensitive keyboard so they've kept top funny-funny okay iPhone size comparison so the so the cover itself is not much thicker than something like Apple's Smart Cover it feels very durable it's quite rigid and then they've actually built a keyboard into it so the keyboard is touch sensitive which means that you type by by touching the spacebar or touching the keys and it is pressure sensitive but there's actually no tactile feedback now there's a separate type cover available that does have a low-profile keyboard I'll look at that one later as a separate unboxing but for now we're gonna focus on the touch cover it has again kind of a velvety sweetie feel to it so it won't scratch up your screen as long as you don't have any sort of rocks or debris or anything caught in it which shouldn't be that much of an issue the surface uses a proprietary six pin connector for data and power for the touch cover itself and it uses magnets to attach to the surface it actually has a touch pad as well and then that looks like left and right mouse click button so that's cool I haven't seen one in person yet so I'm very excited about this you've got proprietary keys up here and you'll notice there's no f1 to f12 keys however you can use the function key to enable those buttons so if you wanted to press alt f4 then you'd go alt function and then F 1 2 3 4 in order to press that ok so included pieces relatively ok looking power brick it's around the size of the Apple 1 and then uses a magnetic connector here to charge the surface tablet itself very very slick looking there you go cameraman can have a look at that if he sees fit the there you go the problems just fold up like that just a Windows RT sticker you can even take that off and it be completely clean and just black all along except for the safety notifications and whatnots inside here once we take out the surface don't worry we'll look at that soon we've got Microsoft's included little brochure getting around in Windows RT so you swipe from the right to open up the charms menu if you this is French if you move your if you're using the trackpad move your pointer into any corner ok to access charms get around surface so they've got everything kind of labeled their hardware setup software so ok so this is a very very basic guide there's really not a whole lot there Windows 8 Pro in Windows RT so something to note about Windows RT is that it's environmentally friendly packaging they're using just kind of a paper like a look you can tell that it's like a recycled paper because it's I'm assuming it's a recycle paper because it's made of sort of bits and pieces of other kinds of paper you know what let's not make any assumptions let's just say that it's made of paper and is therefore recyclable if nothing else surface plastic here we go I'm very excited about this hinge the kickstand as they call it okay it's not light actually it's not light but Microsoft spent a lot of time optimizing the weight distribution inside the surface to make it so that however you're holding it it should be comfortable and it should feel similar regardless of which side you're holding it from so the idea is that even though the weight is a little bit on the heavier side for a tablet it's not like a Galaxy Tab 10.1 or even the Asus vivo tab which is very light also a Windows RT device it feels ok to hold I also like the squared corners these are a 22 degree angled edges all around the entire outside of the tablet rounded corners are nice in theory however you can slip off them and this has a bit of a catch to it so you can see it's not quite just rounded and smooth but you can actually hold on to it okay so I I like that so far the kickstand itself I have not sure how to operate it yet but there you go so you pull it out there makes that noise I guess they apparently spent a lot of time on the noise of the kickstand and when you close it they're comparing it to a luxury door luxury car door closing I'm not quite sure I'd make that comparison but I do like the way it slows down before it hits it so that it doesn't close to heart very nice yes so the reason for the 22 degree edges here is so that it'll actually sit flush when you have the kickstand out and when you're using it it's nice to have this integrated as opposed to being part of the smart cover if you guys have a smart cover or a similar type cover for your iPad I have a smart cover clone and what I don't like about it is that it has over time become far less rigid so it's much harder to prop the device up on the smart cover whereas something like a kickstand I don't think has the potential to ever really become rigid you can see that actually you can hear you can see the design that goes into these hinges it's got one two three hinges here that are all look very very robust I'm just gonna angle this towards the light a little bit more so you can see there all right there's the connector down here okay yeah so let's do the physical tour there's your charging it's fine USB port that is a USB port like you with an S and a B and you can plug in pretty much whatever you want as long as there's driver support so things like printers aren't going to be quite limited at the beginning however any kind of input devices keyboards mice but webcams potentially again it'll come down to support should work in this USB port right there we've got what appears to be micro HDMI out speaker here and a speaker here yes stereo speakers take that Apple and not position such that they'll be covered when you're operating the tablet the tablet is clearly meant to be used in a horizontal landscape orientation so there's your light sensor there's your webcam there's something I don't know what that is and then the windows button is right here so if you use it like this it'll be kind of weird if you're using like a Skype video chat or anything like that power buttons here and I am afraid I don't actually quite know what these are so we'll have to haha oh it doesn't even say like that it doesn't actually point at the speakers on this thing I'm gonna assume they're more check this out though so the the rear facing camera is actually oriented a little bit strangely if you can't see them sorry but it's also oriented 22 degrees off so what that means is if you pull the kickstand out and place the surface down on something that camera will be looking at level now which means that if you're walking around sort of you know do using it as a camera in order to take a picture straight ahead of you you wouldn't hold it out like this instead you'd hold it more like this so you're looking down at it so that it'll take a level picture okay moving right along we've got another headphone jack volume rocker and really nothing nothing extraordinary in terms of IO other that USB port so the setup process is doesn't take that long but I don't know if I'll bring you guys along for the whole thing of course we're reading the EULA very carefully Microsoft spent a lot of time on the screen as well so even though the screen is only 1366 by 768 it is using a bit of a special technology that allows the panel itself to be much closer to the to your eyes then okay so there's a few layers so is your glass layer there's your there's your touchscreen interface layer there's your actual LCD panel layer and what they're trying to do is they're trying to minimize the air gaps in between get them as close as possible because what that does is it reduces reflectivity so while the surface is reflective it'll be more difficult to make out the details of the cameraman based on what I'm seeing already in it then it would be with something that had a bigger air gap that's where that's where that innovation comes from so give me a sec guys I'm just gonna get the wireless set up and moved back I missed a small detail before actually a pretty major detail the micro SDXC port is here under the kickstand so not around the edge it's something you'll never see once you put it in there it'll be completely covered just like that I wonder if you can pry the kickstand up without I know you can that's not that's not actually too difficult so I want to show you guys how the touch cover 2 attaches so cameraman actually did this with me off camera so I don't oh okay Wow okay so it actually aligns itself pretty easily even though see you can see the orientation is not even close and it just kind of figures itself correctly without any difficulty now you've seen people doing this on the Internet but I'm actually going to do it live here for you guys just to show that it's not going anywhere now cameras take on this form factor and we're gonna do the iPhone comparison again that's how thick it is with the touch cover is that it's bulky to which I would reply okay yes it is bulky compared to your iPad 2 or your iPad 3 because it is a slimmer device this does way more the touch cover what I didn't realize about it is I was kind of going yeah it's really thin it's really thin it does way more than you know most tablet covers will but if you compare this not to a tablet but to a notebook because remember this device is actually capable of being a Productivity tool unlike most notebooks which aren't even close to that because of the fact that it does have a notebook able notebook ready resolution of 1366 by 768 you can attach a full keyboard to it and it does have Microsoft Office that to me makes a very big difference now this is my very first time with the touch cover I'm gonna fire upward and there's been a lot of talk about how does the touch cover compare to typing on a real keyboard so let's go with hell no that's not what I meant to say hello world this is me look I can this one this is my first attempt on the touch cover I think I'm doing pretty well so is it perfect no but there are bumps here well they're not bumps there are actually gaps in the letters that will give you some idea if you just kind of go like this it's not gonna detect any button presses because it's pressure sensitive so the pressure whoops that was just a typo sensitive touch cover may take some getting used to very responsive though so there's no there's no delay there's no look there's no lag there's no weirdness that's been associated with some Bluetooth keyboards in the past the touch pads not bad I wish it was a little bit bigger but there's only there's only so much you can do accuracy when you're moving really really slowly I'd say is not as good as I'd like you can see it kind of drifting a little bit there and I I don't know what they can do about that because it's sort of the fuzzy felt kind of material that they're using I don't know how you maintain that kind of accuracy without a more without a more smooth surface that to use so Metro UI start button will do that in theory will it what are we doing here start button there we go what does that one do okay well that one does it um the modern UI so what apps can you use on this thing you will have to shop in the Microsoft Store because this is an ARM architecture device this is using a Tegra 3 processor which is a quad-core processor but not like the fastest mobile processor in the world by any stretch these days what that means is there's no backwards compatibility with your normal Windows devices surface pro is coming and surface pro will be an x86 device which means you can install anything you want in this one the desktop is whoops that's whether the desktop is available but it's almost the only things you can really do are things like accessing your classic task manager your your resource monitor your your office suite which they haven't really changed the interface much compared to what we've seen on desktop versions you can use the File Explorer and you can actually use that with the USB port you have access to where Windows is actually installed so you can see there's 17 gigs free out of our 32 gigs total so you know users you can browse and you can move files around just the way you would on a real computer but you can't go and install like CPU said to tell you about the processor in here it just doesn't work that way so the pro will be x86 so you're going to be doing mostly everything from this UI here and the animations are very very smooth Microsoft's work very hard on making sure that they don't have some of those early Android sort of awkwardness things going on where the animations start to look very jerky if you do certain things so the store everything will be through the store an app written for the modern UI or the Metro UI whatever you want to call it should be compatible with Windows 8 and with Windows RT even though they're really not the same thing just with a recompile it's just older apps where you're gonna run into that difficulty and it'll take time for things to get updated I mean you've got your Netflix New York Times it'll take again it'll take time but it's Microsoft they'll find a way to get the right things released people are complaining especially reviewers about the lack of a Facebook or a Twitter app especially from the start there's a new a gap come on guys gotta go getting in my video here and I think that pretty much covers it for now now it's possible cameraman and I screwed something up because while it was setting up we were playing around with the keyboard but now that we've done a quick reboot everything is working correctly so the windows button now works swiping in from the right aha charms menu so that'll is where you'll access your search although it's totally unnecessary to do that because you can just type control panel and you don't even have to open up the search in order to search for something which i think is fantastic sharing is gonna be well for sharing things nothing can be shared from the desktop its context you'll let's go back to the Metro from the modern UI modern UI settings so these are really smart the way they've got this implemented I love the way that they've done volume and power where it actually just readjusts where it is to where you left it off and then you can go up or down from there same thing with screen brightness so you can always access settings like screen brightness without digging through your menus if you're someone like me who's constantly tinkering with screen brightness you're gonna appreciate stuff like this as you move from you know darker rooms to brighter rooms or whatever else the case may be swiping from the bottom and from the top are things that are going to be specific to given applications so here we're in Internet Explorer 10 you can change a lot of settings in IE 10 through the modern you all actually you can't really change any settings in IE 10 through the modern UI see there's a few internet options here but most of them are going to be changed anything more advanced from the desktop internet explorer and you can use this one if you prefer remember this is Internet Explorer 10 fully flash enabled unlike other mobile platforms now so that's something that may matter to certain people like me for example so let's go back to our modern UI so let's go ahead and open a couple of things in open a new tab hold it down open a new whoops copy link nope I press the wrong thing open link in new tab so we've got a few tabs this is how its handling tab browsing you scroll down from the top and then you navigate to whichever one that you want you've got a nice little preview there you can also add tabs this way and then just key and manually what you want so for example ponies we could look at pictures of ponies on the internet very quickly on the surface from Microsoft swiping in from the left hand side gives you access to a multitasking sort of menu here since we've only got one oh yeah right screen sharing so there's true multitasking on Windows RT you could have like Skype running here with a video preview you could have a messenger application you can have anything you want actually running from either side oh actually I don't know I don't remember how you do it this way no that's not right Wow how do that ah here okay so here's task switching give me a sec I'll figure out how that works give me one moment so let's fire up the Maps app and it'll just use GPS to zone and on wherever we happen to be I've seen a lot of complaints about application loading time for me I'm still using an iPhone 4 so it doesn't bother me that much but that's where we are if you want to search for something nearby then you can just kind of go McDonald's and in theory really no results were found for my search I've never used Bing Maps before so it's possible that I'm doing it wrong somehow but let's go with NCIX and see if it manages to find ah yes so NCIX is more important to Microsoft than McDonald's apparently which is awesome so it shows us a bunch of different ones you can browse between them like this I promised to show you guys how the how the multitasking are task switching works so what you do is you drag in from the left and then back out and you can easily switch between any of the apps that you have open is extremely fast and feels very smooth and go all the way up to the desktop where we have Word document that we're working on and then you can also bring any of those applications out to the forefront like this and then you can also pin them to the side just like that so that's how that whole thing works so we're playing back Big Buck Bunny in 1080p and the realization oh oh we figured out how to put tasks over here as well is that it is a little bit on the cha twelve it's not a little bit choppy it is choppy it's not quite it's not quite able to do that yet this is using the is this using the modern browser yeah modern browser versus the desktop version browser however it's watchable it's certainly watchable I do want to show you guys how to do this though so if you wanted to move let's say okay so there I think you guys get the point so we've got our Photos app open and if we wanted our Photos app on the right-hand side we open that first then we take maps and we don't do that we go to our Photos app sorry I'm still getting used to it this is literally my first time sitting down with this then we take maps and we bring it out here then we go like this now we can see our wonderful photos which we haven't added any of here while we use the Maps app in the foreground and you can switch them back and forth like that or even swipe the whole thing away if you want to close an app you just take it and drag it all the way down to the bottom and it will be close so it's not using up any resources however you do have two gigs of ram so unless you're running heavy-duty applications you shouldn't run up against that too often because you'll be cpu limited in more cases than not compared to being ram limited so I think that pretty much wraps it up for my Windows Windows RT and Microsoft Surface first impressions it's not that warm it's a touch warm here but it's very localized the edges are still quite cool which is nice because that means when you're holding it like this you're not gonna get that sweaty palms thing going on that you do with some with some mobile devices the iPad 3 in particular I have a hard time dealing with whereas the iPad 2 I find is just just spectacular so what's the point of all this to me this isn't a tablet so much as it is a laptop replacement and it's not quite a laptop replacement because you can't do the same kind of serious work on this that you can on a laptop so we're at kind of this this point of either convergence or divergence depending on how you want to look at it where these kinds of devices where you can use the touchscreen to interact here you can use the mouse and the keyboard to interact here are not going away this is this is here to stay and I really like the usage model just not quite sure where it fits in with this whole RT arm powered thing I'm really excited to check out surface pro which is coming soon thank you for checking out this unboxing your first look on - tech tips and don't forget to subscribe a cameraman sort of put it in his way and he's more of an Apple guy but his comment is this is for people who don't want the lock down restriction of the iPad they want more productivity than that but aren't necessarily typing 5,000 word essays on a regular basis so this is good enough also I realized I never did show the camera app the camera app is pretty straightforward so you got your 720p camera on the front you can switch cameras like that and like I said see it's looking straight ahead in spite of the fact that the kickstand is out motions pretty smooth camera options are pretty limited so you can adjust your resolution or you can adjust your audio device that's about it and then you can switch from video mode to camp ooh that's fast video mode or not video mode so let's go ahead and point it so this is this is how I use it to point it straight ahead see which was actually kind of nice as long as you're filming at this level but if you were like trying to see over a crowd at a concert or something with your tablet and take a video I mean people who take video on their tablets in public though no offense but I mean if you were trying to do that then it'd be kind of awkward but here let's go ahead and look at this plant I'm not super it's not super high light sort of scenario here but we can go ahead and you just touch the screen in order to take a picture and what I meant to do was take a video so we can capture video this frame rates not particularly high but there's the plans and there's the bottom of the plant and we can stop it just like that there's not really a delay though that's kind of nice so let's see how fast the shutter is here let's take a picture of some cars that's nice then we go ahead and go back to the main thing and then we can open our whoopsie-daisy that's not what I was looking for I need that sorry like I said still getting used to it guys and then I'm looking for the Photos app which I have now lost well yeah they're just frightened right in the middle right in the middle of like everything pictures library now has all the pictures I took there you go camera roll just like that there's the video okay let's see if play lacks like on that there you go okay we're done for real this time don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips and my luxury car audio luxury car audio I'm still sick I'm still a little like no not quite you know card or tablet that I got