Ok, I spent some time with my Surface, here are my general impressioins, including both hardware and software :
Good :
- shape and build quality. I like the solid aspect of the whole device, the magnetic *click* when snapping a cover to it.
- battery life. Always a pleasure to use it for a long period, then checking the battery and seeing it 75% full. My old laptop made me paranoid about needing a power plug for any extensive use.
- all the features I needed are there : web browser, office, remote desktop,...
- everything is fast and fluid, mostly.
- features like Xbox music/Smarglass work perfectly, actually better than on my laptop (which sometimes loses connection and cannot detect the Xbox any more).
Bad / "Could be better" :
- fingerprints on the back (and on the screen of course, but that was expectd). It's annoying.
- using it on your lap isn't very convenient. The type cover is functional, but the balance of the whole thing doesn't feel stable (and isn't really). Annoying since I usually browse from an armchair, so I'm more frequently in tablet mode.
- IE in portrait mode is ugly : the text font seems downsampled (and there's no point in watching a site like neogaf in landscape), it's still readable but not too comfortable. I hope it will be fixed in an update since it's obviously a software problem, or that better browsers like Opera will be released for RT.
- IE "swipe to go back" can be interpreted as the left swipe to change active app.
- I had trouble on the store at first because the tablet thought I was located in the UK. There was no option to change it from the regular option menus, I had to go to Control Panel to change my location, which wasn't very intuitive. It works now, though.
- I've had it slow down to a crawl once, needing a complete restart to make it work again. I think I was doing an update while launching the store, or something like that.
On the whole, I'm quite satisfied with it. It really makes my everyday use of computers more comfortable, even though it's still not perfect yet. It is definitely a good thing to be able to use a tablet "almost like a laptop". They should just make it easier to hold on your lap.
