Gadgetory

hey this is Josh from the verge and we're taking a look at the Microsoft Surface the much anticipated long-awaited first ever tablet designed and built by Microsoft the device is a black rectangle the edges are tapered back a bit so it's got kind of an angular profile the device itself is made out of a material that Microsoft calls vapor mag or vapor mg though it feels like thin aluminum in your hands that's not a knock it actually feels quite nice around the back of the device you can see it has a metal kickstand it's actually made the same material as the rest of the casing and it flips out with a reassuring click I like the kickstand idea on paper though in practice it really only has one function which is to set the surface down on a table you can't really put it on your lap and you also can't adjust the positioning of the kickstand the device has two cameras there's one on the back and one on the front they're both 720p and they both kind of don't look that great on the top of the device there's a power and sleep button on the left side there's a volume rocker and a headphone jack on the right side there's actually a USB port and a micro HDMI jack the device has two microphones and it's got a set of stereo speakers that are located along the top of the tablet which sound pretty good though I did notice them distorting on a few things that I played back on the bottom of the device there's a magnetic dock connector which is used at this point only for the type and touch cover the surface feels really well made when you're holding it I mean I would say that the construction of the device is on par with the iPad it feels a little bit thicker and it's definitely a little bit heavier and due to the 16:9 display it's a little bit awkward when you're holding it in landscape and it's really awkward when you're holding it in portrait it kind of wants to be on a desk the surface has two unique accessories that do double duty as keyboards and protective covers one is called the type cover and one is called the touch cover the type cover is actually a dedicated tactile keyboard it snaps on to that magnetized dock on the bottom and covers the front of the device with kind of a gray felt you can flip it around to the back though it is a little odd holding to a tablet and feeling an actual keyboard behind it the touch cover takes a slightly different approach instead of having real keys with travel it has raised characters on the material that the protective cover is made out of it does work fairly well though it's definitely not as easy as using the type cover or a dedicated keyboard though I will say I'm impressed by how well the trackpad and multi-touch response works on both the type cover and the touch cover of course the big story with the surface isn't the hardware even though that is a pretty big story the real focus here is the fact that this is a Windows RT device Windows RT is of course a variation of Windows 8 which is made for armed chipsets and it has some peculiar idiosyncrasies for starters you have a desktop Windows environment that looks a lot like Windows 7 but there are only five apps you can actually use in this environment and that's Word PowerPoint Excel OneNote and a desktop version of Internet Explorer there are a couple of other small windows apps like paint and notepad but they're really more of system utilities and a dedicated application luckily you don't really see the desktop environment that much you really are going to be spending the vast majority of your time in the new modern UI environment the good news about the modern UI is that it's actually a really interesting new operating system that has a lot of potential in my opinion from the get-go the tile interface seems really inventive and useful right when you first log into the machine you get a bunch of live tiles that are giving you information like your next calendar appointment or your latest email and it's actually something that I found myself looking at and using day-to-day while I was testing the surface there are a bunch of gestures that are used to get around this environment and they're not immediately obvious there's basically four main ones that's a swipe from the right to bring up the charms bar a swipe from the left to multitask or to flip through the apps that you have open a swipe up or down from the top or bottom of the device which brings up a contextual menu for different areas of whatever app you happen to be in and finally there's kind of a dunking motion which is when you swipe from the top to the bottom and sort of pull the app that you're in I guess into the garbage you throw it away it's how you quit an app one of the standout apps in the modern UI environment is the browser it did a great job of rendering pretty much any page that I went to for some reason Microsoft decided to equip the arm devices with flash and the pre-installed plug-in doesn't do that great of a job at playing back flash video html5 video definitely fared better and I was able to get some decent framerate fullscreen video playing within the browser while performance does seem good for most of the applications there are places where it seemed to suffer a few of the games I tried had sluggish behavior and some of the third-party apps and even some of the first party apps took a while to load they were often very slow to get going though once they did they were usually smooth enough speaking of third-party apps the Windows Store is not heavily populated right now Microsoft says that there are more apps on the way and I suspect there going to be some bigger name apps appearing in the store after the launch of the surface but during my testing I found the selection quite lacking the surface is available in three different varieties you can get a 32 gig version for $4.99 you can get a 32 gig with an included touch cover for $5.99 or you can get a 64 gigabyte version with a touch cover for $6.99 otherwise you're going to pay 120 bucks for the touch cover and 130 bucks for the type cover while reviewing the surface I spent a lot of time thinking about who this device was for Microsoft has been touting the surface is kind of a do-everything device it's a laptop when you need to get real work done and it's a tablet when you want to have more casual Leanback experiences the problem is that as a tablet I don't think the surface is as good as its nearest competition in terms of the ecosystem the app selection it's just not there and frankly this form factor is just a bit awkward and so things like reading in bed seem kind of out of the question with the surface on the flipside as a laptop there are some things that the surface is really lacking the big one is obviously legacy support for Windows software if you're a current window user it would be a very jarring experience to move to this device additionally the form factor gets in the way of this thing really making sense you can't put it on your lap so in a similar way that the form factor makes it awkward as a tablet it also makes it awkward as a laptop ultimately Microsoft's promise that Windows 8 would be a no compromise operating system isn't realized in the surface the service actually requires quite a lot of compromise some users will be able to make those compromises and will love using it but for a lot of users out there it may be asking too much