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Vio Reviews: The Surface Pro 4

VioDuskar
By VioDuskar
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I'd like to start by saying i don't normally review things, but i'm kind of early on this bandwagon, so i figure i might help some people out.

i bought my mom a surface pro 3 about 2 months ago and she loves it, and i haven't been able to play with it much, however I did really like the look and feel. 

 

I have a laptop, and i'll say this, the surface pro, while pretty great, does not kill my laptop. 

 

now onto the review.

 

at first glace, i wasn't too impressed, the Surface was really shiny and looks great, but it felt weird in my hands.

it's heavy enough that if i held it on the narrow side with only one hand, i could easily drop it. but it's also light enough to held under your arm or throw in a bag without noticing any extra heft.

the size is ever so sightly too big for my small hands, which makes it impossible to use the on screen keyboard.

Microsoft does have a split keyboard option for folks like me, but it's not a very natural feel. 

The body features are amazing though, some of the things i admired about apple are finally on a device i'll use. (Personal preference)

Mag-Lock charging, and a metal frame. Awesome, I was really excited about this! but that's not all, the keyboard, pen and charger all magnetically lock to the frame, though the keyboard snaps ever so slightly off-center sometimes, and the pen lock isn't as strong on the charger side.

 

About the ports, it has one USB, and one miniDP, which isn't much, but it also packs a micro SD slot behind the kick stand, which is pretty sneaky microsoft, i like it!

 

Onto the pen. When you attempt to type on the screen with the pen, it expects you to draw the letters on a line, which doesn't really do it for me, but it recognizes print very well, and it even did a fairly good job at picking up my cursive. The pen is amazing at pressure sensing, but I don't think many uses will notice. A friend of mine started playing a few games of tick tack toe in one note and found that the lines get really thin on the surface's 2736*1824 resolution display, but super bold lines really came out well when you pressed hard, and tapered off as if it where a real pencil. 

 

on the topic of one note, the pen's "eraser" can be pressed once to open one note, and double clicked to take a screen shot. if you're in one note it will save your current note and open a fresh one. of note though, the screen shots you take with the double eraser click will be saved as an image in one note and in your photos. Clicking and holding activates cortana, and i'm still testing her out. (The bing2google extension makes her tolerable so far.) The eraser actually works as an eraser (as one would expect) to rub out lines you made, but it rubs out entire lines by default, not just erasing in an area. 

 

the surface pro 4 crams tons of pixels in and it makes some tasks really clumsy sometimes, your task bar icons are really small, and almost require the pen to use. The high pixel could is great for HD videos and seeing a whole webpage at once. i do some coding and it really helps when the surface is in portrait mode. (Though this means i can't use the type cover keyboard.)

 

Now, at first i thought tablet mode was dumb, but i gave it a chance. it has some benefits, but to make it reasonably useful i had to change some of my personal habits. 

first, i normally don't use the search bar, but it really helps in tablet mode. To be clear, tablet mode does not show the desktop, it shows you all of the tiles on your start bar, so being able to search on the search bar is nice. additionally, the taskview button really shines in tablet mode too, because your application icons don't show up on your task bar, which is fine. on the whole, tablet mode is "OKAY" and if you don't like it you can change how it acts. without the type cover though, it doesn't know when to swap between tablet and desktop mode.

 

And boy let me tell you about that type cover, it sucks. it's cool, and you need it, but it sucks. 

first, again, it is cool. it's nice to have a cover over my screen to protect it. The type cover even maglocks in either a flat or ramped position depending on your type style. 

the back even feels really smooth, like pilot leather. The type cover even knows when you fold it back so you don't mash keys on accident, and I believe it know when you close the surface, because the screen shuts off.

but that's about it. they keys still don't have the right feel, they're just too flat. the glass trackpad is really odd feeling on my fingers, and the damn thing cost an extra 130$. 

I feel like the type cover is a necessity. You need it. you NEED it. without it your screen is exposed, and you can't type effectively with your hands because of the size of the screen. 

I believe it should be included in the surface's price. my surface pro 4 was the i5 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. it cost me 1299.99 USD. while that's great for what you get compared to other laptops, other laptops have keyboards. 

 

Overall, it's great, there are nifty touch features like swiping back and forth through web pages, swiping into task view, and other misc functions, but it's not a laptop killer in any way. it's a laptop companion that can do most of the same features if you need it too. it's great for netflix in bed, great for reading and general web surfing, but not great for game streaming, coding, or typing LTT user reviews. 

 

of note, microsoft claims the battery lasts for 9 hours of video streaming. this isn't true. i had a full charge this morning and went on a YouTube spiral which lasted four hours. my battery was only 34%, which means it only lasts about 6 hours for video streaming. (test at 25% brightness with powersave mode ON) So, it's okay. much better than my dell studio 1747's 1.5 hour battery life, but it isn't mind blowing. it could last the average user all day.

 

another cool extra, the surface pro 4's charging brick has a USB port on it, so you can use it to charge your phone :)

 

I like it, and i'm not going to take it back. it's great, but it doesn't replace my laptop for actual work. (coding in visual studios, making powerpoints, working in excel) The power/screen button is kind of wibbly wobbly, and but the volume rocker is firm, almost too firm. both seem oddly placed to me, but they work fine, and i didn't find myself ever accidentally hitting them.  

Though, if i was an artist, I could really see myself getting a lot of use out of the stylus. (I don't make solid models anymore)

 

like if you liked it, dislike if you disliked it, subscribe for more future content and tell me in the comments if you'd like to see a review of the logitech G933 wireless headphone!

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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like if you liked it, dislike if you disliked it, subscribe for more future content and tell me in the comments if you'd like to see a review of the logitech G933 wireless headphone!

 

lmfao holy shit

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lmfao holy shit

i put that at the end because i figured no one will read my wall of text and jump to the end, and i might get a few pity LOLz

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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bump because i updated some things, added more notes.

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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When the audio book coming out?

if you want to annoy me, then join my teamspeak server ts.benja.cc

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When the audio book coming out?

it should release in time for christmas! 

We can't Benchmark like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to shove more GPUs in your computer. Like the time I needed to NV-Link, because I needed a higher HeavenBench score, so I did an SLI, which is what they called NV-Link back in the day. So, I decided to put two GPUs in my computer, which was the style at the time. Now, to add another GPU to your computer, costs a new PSU. Now in those days PSUs said OCZ on them, "Gimme 750W OCZs for an SLI" you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah, the important thing was that I had two GPUs in my rig, which was the style at the time! They didn't have RGB PSUs at the time, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big green ones. 

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