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The MS Surface Pro

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Re: The MS Surface Pro

#91

Post by tripzilch »

asafira wrote: post #60
Bockit wrote: post #11

It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual sections, maybe a storage, space, benchmarks, screen, software kind of thing, we have a guy who has specific use cases for it talking about how he used it for those cases, what worked and what didn't. And then comparing it to how he normally does those kinds of activ…

I'm going to admit that I haven't had the chance to read the review in its entirety, but I wanted to reply to this comment anyway. I have a similar issue where I feel as if I am not getting a lot out of many of the reviews I read for products online. For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. Many reviews will put up charts and graphs with benchmarks. But what exactly does a scor…

> For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works.

It's not that hard, you just need to use it and review that.

Problem is, that takes a good couple of hours of seriously trying out the machine for seriously doing some work. The author of this article even took a couple of days, and did some serious Googling and tweaking to smooth out any wrinkles he encountered (which is the use case for anyone who buys the device because they are expensive: if they "just work" that's great, but if there's a work-around or fix, that's still better than if it "just doesn't work").

But for many review sites, it's much faster to just run some benchmarks (or just copy the numbers from somewhere), compare that to some previous models, some current/similar models, and review that. It doesn't take a lot of effort, time or creative thinking.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#92

Post by Benjojo »

supar wrote: post #86

Are there any digitizer users here? I use a Wacom digitizer daily for notes and sketches instead of using pen&paper. My wet dream is a pressure&tilt sensitive/e-ink based device, but it looks like the Surface Pro is the closest you can get currently - and this is a good review. If you want a portable device (laptop/ultrabook/tablet) with a good digitizer that you can actually use (that is, wacom based), your options…

>There is the Lifebook T902, or the ThinkPad X230T. I have a X230T (typing on it now) Overall the whole thing is great. I would highly recommend it.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#93

Post by scholia »

phaus wrote: post #48
seanx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony Duo 11. I have one as my primary dev machine and it works pretty well + I can play Civ 5 on the plane.

Is there anything that you are less than satisfied with about it? I was close to getting one, but when I heard the stylus was the S-Trig (significantly inferior to the Wacom for artistic purposes) I just got an iPad 4 to hold me over for a couple of years. It looked really awesome, but 1300 bucks is quite a bit of money for me.

Drawing on an iPad is dreadful....

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#94

Post by seanmcdirmid »

redact207 wrote: post #89
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I observe the same thing happening in China (entertainment, no tablets used for work). I was talking about a trend in the states, we can only guess what it means for Asia. Many of them are writing papers, doing homework, whatever. You'd be surprised how much work just involves writing something. They almost always have physical keyboards attached to the iPad when they are writing, if you don't look close enough, they…

I spent a lot of time in China, but it was sadly before the tablet craze. I'd take a punt and say their cultural and business norms don't require so much writing and people would own it for the status - much like a designer handbag - and possibly QQ. Ironically it's the tablets that's much more compatible with their traditional written language. Sure you have pinyin/wubi based IMEs, and touch devices have had hand wr…

Most Chinese kids these days prefer phonetic keyboard input (pinyin) to writing characters, so they don't mind an iPad over something with a stylus. iPads are ubiquitous where I live (Beijing), so I wouldn't call it much of a handbag thing anymore. Maybe in a tier 2/3 city.

If you are learning Chinese, I wouldn't bother on memorizing how to write the characters but rather focus on how to input the pinyin and recognize the right character to select (erm, reading). I know this sounds like giving up, but its the new way.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#95

Post by anonymfus »

interpol_p wrote: post #36
T-Winsnes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would look at it the other way. Why is the app so broken that it doesn't have support for multiple DPIs?

The app shouldn't know about the DPI being used by the OS. It should be completely transparent to the app — this is not the app's responsibility.

If app don't manifest itself as DPI aware then it's completely transparent because of so-called "DPI virtualisation". But some apps don't use system font rendering or want to draw lines precisely 1 pixel width or want to control anti-aliasing during zoom or so on, and such applications are either blured by DPI virtualisation (because 1 pixel width line is now 1.5 pixel at 150% scaling) or they manifest itself as "DPI aware" and then every pixel is rendered as told by app.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#97

Post by supar »

Benjojo wrote: post #92
supar wrote: post #86

Are there any digitizer users here? I use a Wacom digitizer daily for notes and sketches instead of using pen&paper. My wet dream is a pressure&tilt sensitive/e-ink based device, but it looks like the Surface Pro is the closest you can get currently - and this is a good review. If you want a portable device (laptop/ultrabook/tablet) with a good digitizer that you can actually use (that is, wacom based), your options…

>There is the Lifebook T902, or the ThinkPad X230T. I have a X230T (typing on it now) Overall the whole thing is great. I would highly recommend it.

Can you give us some feedback on how the screen hinge flips? Is there a slot for the pen?

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#98

Post by arrrg »

redact207 wrote: post #7

I'm just impressed that someone's finally found a practical way to do work on a tablet.

I … don’t really get that obsession with doing work on them. Who cares, really? No one ever asks why no one does any work on their TVs.

Tablets are perfectly fine and awesome entertainment devices. Plus, I do nearly all my email on them.

Why does everyone always act like doing work is the only thing that could ever justify tablets?

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#99

Post by pmelendez »

raganwald wrote: post #64
ohwp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Issues like the battery life, heat, weight, RAM free, and so on are reasonable for a Windows machine." Common, this is so childish... As if other devices don't get hot and don't weight that much. You are very wrong in thinking that company X will take over the world. There are different people with different needs. Hipsters like hip devices, cartoonists like Surface Pro's. jacquesm points it out: the iPad market mig…

Childish? I feel old, stuck in world where HN was civil and we didn't abuse each other with accusations of childishness. I own an iPad and an iPad Mini. Neither has ever run so hot that it was uncomfortable to place on my lap. The review specifically states that he did experience it running too hot for his comfort. I read that the surface pro is 2 lbs, while a full-sized iPad is less than 1.5 lbs. Nowhere did I state…

>"I own an iPad and an iPad Mini. Neither has ever run so hot that it was uncomfortable to place on my lap."

They are not running portal 2, league of legends or sketchbook either. Those are natural trade-offs where Apple sacrifices productivity and Microsoft sacrifices portability.

Re: The MS Surface Pro

#100

Post by SEMW »

elemeno wrote: post #76
Cushman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That URL is deeply confusing.

I'd imagine that it's a result of people running into the same issue whilst duel booting Windows on Macs with Retina screens.

Exactly right: the image is from http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4309?viewlocale=en_US&loca.... (Props to Google reverse image search).
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