Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Richter from techno before you for you of the surface to the sequel to the original surface RT everything has changed here about the tablet a lot of improvements but is it worth your tablet buying buck especially in a very crowded atmosphere let's go ahead and see if it's the right tablet for you so as I do with all my reviews I want to give a disclaimer I use this not as my only tablet but in conjunction with the new surface pro 2 and an iPad Mini for the better part of four days previously I had used a surface pro for about four months as almost my only tablet so I was very familiar with the user interface and have a tablet perform so before we get into Windows 8.1 and the OS I want to talk a little bit about the hardware the hardware is so drastically improved over the original surface RT I can't overstate that enough it is as different as the original iPad versus the iPad 3 it feels lighter the screen is higher resolution the material somehow feel better I like the gray color the kickstand which is a little bit awkward to have on your lap and I has a second angle which makes it so much easier to view on your lap or on a desk everything about this tablet feels nice it feels especially light and if you compare it to the surface pro 2 it almost feels like half of a tablet when the issues I had with your original surface RT was that a felt really laggy as powered by a pretty well SPECT egg row 3 but a hard time managing HD video and another app running side by side not so here with the surface pro 2 which is updates game 2 quad-core Tegra 4 everything on this tablet feels iffy in fact if you never went into the desktop you would have no way of seeing powered by a Tegra 4 you might think a core i5 4 is under the hood HD video plays awesomely and works great when you want a multitask with HD video and something else no issue with that at all there is no app slowdown and I noticed no lag this is a very very very quick tablet talking about the operating system I'm not going to sort of harp on that too much as we've covered Windows 8.1 quite a bit but there are a few really nice things here the Microsoft has done the first is in the camera app you would expect that to really be that much the camera has been improved the pictures don't look overly awesome but it's still a tablet I could you know take this to your kids soccer game take pictures because I hope you're not going to do not take this out in public and take pictures but if you do find yourself taking pictures Mike Copps done a really nice job the photo editing suite it's a pretty in-depth photo editing takes you beyond just regular red eye and crop you can actually do some real tweaks images that are pretty powerful and things you wouldn't expect on you know lower end tablet speaking of lower and tablet the starting price and this is a bit hard to swallow a 449 bucks for a 32 gig model if you want to up that it's been axed 100 bucks and get the 64 gig but the one saving grace for the price per storage that it does have a pretty conveniently now located micro SD card slot they made it much easier to get to and the location behind the kickstand so I mentioned things seemed really quick things seem really zippy the tablet itself feels absolutely incredible to hold but when you do hold it so holding a tablet with a very odd aspect ratio when you're using it on a desk with the type cover or anything it's a really nice tablet to work with you've got a nice big screen but you're holding on your lap or holding in bed it's not very comfortable and especially awkward way to try and hold it in portrait just feels very weird and very tall that's a personal preference thing I never got used to it I always refer to work on this either on a desk or on my lap but I never got used to actually holding the tablet and browsing around so something gonna have to try and store free decided whether or not this is the right tablet for you so as I mentioned HD video everything works great one thing that you're not going to get with the windows 8.1 RT operating system if you're a can get a full desktop applications and I figure to use your legacy windows app so if you want to use Photoshop or you know play Starcraft or steam whatever it might be this is definitely not a tablet for you you're going to want to look at the surface pro 2 or the original surface pro which gives you a full desktop and the ability to run all those legacy apps but you can still access a desktop only thing you can do with it is run a full Microsoft Office suite which now includes outlook so you can have free access and give it to you right out of the box for Word PowerPoint Excel out looking the rest of the office we which is kind of nice the opportunity if you do a lot of typing or spreadsheets or if your student you want something to watch videos on or do some heavy editing this actually works pretty well and there was no slowdown at all using the office suite on the type of Ford process of reusing it on the i-5 I'm also reviewing a surface pro to sort of in conjunction with this I really notice is zero difference with those two at all one of the big issues I have with the Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 platform isn't with the hardware it's not what the software it's what the applications and that's really where I ran into trouble with the surface 2 and the surface pro 2 the day isn't that app support date expect now if you put this side-by-side and you base it just on the built in applications with an iPad air even iPad 4 and iPad Mini the Nexus 7 or any of the variety of Android tablets the stacks of really well it performs great video looks awesome it's quick there's plenty of video stores you can watch TV shows music and move either at the Xbox music and all kinds of other ways to access your things here but where it starts to really fall behind from the competitions in the apps the apps just are not here yet now maybe it's good it's a relatively new operating system but maybe it's because developers aren't seeing it worthwhile to code for the Windows 8 and modern UI and that was really a problem Facebook for example just to launch their Facebook app now certainly you can view a lot of these applications in their web varieties and I did I use Facebook on the website I use Instagram on the website but I would like native applications that work with this pretty large and beautiful screen and that's just not here that's holding it back on the surface Pro surface pro 2 you can access the legacy app so their applications are pretty much everything has ever been built for Windows you can pretty much use on that but not so with the surface to so I was really disappointed with that but if you're looking for a tablet that's really high for productivity it's probably the most productive tablet you know in that range of the iPads and Nexus 7 you can get a lot of work done with it I still have a hard time with media creation you know aside from words sweet but if you want to do sort of passive media consumption or you want to create some documents it's a really really good tablet comfortable it's light its well-designed it's got a USB port a full USB 3.0 port which a lot of other tablets don't offer it's got expandable memory it's got the pretty cool way of charging using a magnetized connector it's got incredible battery life I was able to go almost nine and a half hours of using this tablet and between charge now turn the screen brightness down very much I had it about 80% obviously connected to Wi-Fi and it worked really really well so it's gonna come down to what you want if you want a tablet that can run Microsoft Office the no-brainer this is a great choice but I'm something that can do everything that's going to have all the apps and all the games and being able to check your email and watch YouTube videos you might want to check your app compatibility to make sure that there is an app available for the windows modern UI or Windows RT to make sure that's going to work for you if you might find yourself a little bit disappointed overall though the tablet just out of the box incredible experience but the app selection really hindered it back and that's maybe no fault of Microsoft but perhaps they could do more to try and lure developers the tablet gets a pretty solid 7.5 it had better app support it would have been up to the 8.5 perhaps even nine range I love the way it feels another way it works I'll probably use this as a tablet in my home for a while but you're the kind of person relies a lot of apps you know we're gonna have one tablet in your house or your office you really want to make sure that the apps you want are going to be here or at least going to be coming in the very near future so what'd you guys think do you agree or disagree through review of the surface - am i way off do you see a huge benefit I didn't mention that I leave something out do you disagree with what I'm saying I'd love to hear your thoughts please leave them in the comments right down below the video a thumbs up from staff we appreciate it until next time I'm John R Ettinger from TechnoBuffalo I'll see you next video what's up everyone its Ashlee thanks so much for watching that most recent video if you enjoyed it please click on the word subscribe right underneath me to get tons of more tech videos from us here at TechnoBuffalo we have got unboxings comparisons reviews recaps and everything else you can think of here on the channel if you're in the mood for more technology just click right over here to check out some of our most recent videos see you next time humans