Microsoft Surface RT review

When Microsoft dropped the bombshell that it was launching its own tablet, the company not only risked alienating its PC partners, but detonating its credibility if it failed to show them how to do it properly.

There’s no doubt that the Microsoft Surface RT is a serious tablet, but is it good enough to tempt people away from their iPads, their Android tablets, or even their laptops? Or is it a mere stopgap until the fully fledged Windows 8 versions of the Surface tablet arrive to complement this ARM-based version?

The Surface hardware

Microsoft made clear right from the outset that the Surface was intended to set an example to the PC manufacturers, and it’s immediately apparent that this isn’t a piece of boilerplate hardware. Two things make the Surface stand out from the uniform slabs of glass we’ve witnessed over the past couple of years: the kickstand and the detachable keyboards (which you can read about here).

The mechanics of the kickstand are beautifully simple. The bottom half of the back of the tablet casing flicks out to create a stand, turning the device into a pseudo-laptop when used with one of the keyboards. When you’re finished with the stand, it flips back into place, perfectly flush with the back of the tablet, and with the satisfying clunk of an expensive car door.

However, the stand is set at a fixed position, leaving no means of adjusting the angle of the screen as you would on a conventional laptop. That left the taller members of the PC Pro team awkwardly hunched over the Surface as they attempted to work with the device at a desk, although our more modestly sized colleagues had no complaint.

That slightly too upright angle would be a much bigger problem if the 10.6in screen wasn’t so sparkling. Viewing angles are excellent – perhaps a little too good for snoopers in an adjacent train seat.

A maximum screen brightness of 400cd/m[sup]2[/sup] is comparable to that of the iPad, and while the Surface has an impressive measured contrast ratio of 3,333:1, it’s due to the presence of dynamic contrast.

Flick between dark and bright pages, and it’s possible to detect the backlight raising and lowering brightness to compensate. Still, the IPS panel guarantees that the palette of bright colours that make up the Windows 8 Start screen zing off the display, and photos and video deliver sumptuous levels of saturation.

The 1,366 x 768 resolution isn’t going to give Apple’s engineering department cause to shamefacedly return to the drawing board, but when you’re sitting a foot or so away from the Surface screen it doesn’t feel as though it lacks detail or sharpness.

The tablet feels delightful in the hand, too. There’s much marketing waffle around the so-called VaporMg material that forms the casing, but it feels robust and smooth to the touch. The charcoal black design is commendably understated, with only a subtle Windows logo adorning the rear.

At 680g (without a keyboard) it’s only a shade heavier than the third-generation iPad, and even with a keyboard case attached, it’s much lighter than most ultraportable laptops. At no point does the Surface ever get uncomfortably warm, either.

Connectivity and ports

Connectivity and expandability are other strong suits for the Surface. On the right-hand side of the tablet you’ll find a micro-HDMI port, for which Microsoft has created a pair of optional adapters for running external displays via HDMI or VGA. Unlike iPads or Android tablets, Windows RT allows you to extend your desktop on to a secondary display rather than merely mirroring the tablet screen, which is a huge bonus when it comes to getting down to work.

Beneath the micro-HDMI there’s a USB 2 port, which can be used to plug in all manner of peripherals, including external hard disks, mice, digital cameras and even printers – a full list of compatible devices can be found here. We plugged in all manner of devices, new and old, and the only one we struggled to make work was an ageing Fujitsu scanner, and that has driver issues with Windows 7 too.

If you don’t want to waste a USB port on an external mouse or keyboard, the Bluetooth 4 support allows you to use a wireless keyboard and mouse at your desktop. Elsewhere on the wireless front, there’s dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, but no 3G option.

Secreted beneath that flip-out stand is also a microSDXC slot, capable of adding another 64GB of removable storage to the Surface. That might well be a necessity if you opt for the 32GB version: it has only 16GB of free space, with almost half the stated storage consumed by Windows, the Office apps and the recovery partition. The 64GB version has 46GB free.

Working with Windows RT

So, there’s little to complain about on the hardware side: what about the software? Surface is running Windows RT, the ARM-optimised version of Windows 8, and that necessarily involves a few awkward compromises.

The most obvious of these is that almost all desktop software is prohibited. Even though the traditional Windows desktop remains very much a part of the build – available through a Start menu tile just like it is in the x86 versions of Windows 8 – the only software that’s permitted to run here is the preinstalled Office suite and Internet Explorer. Even if traditional x86 software vendors were prepared to recompile their software for ARM, it would make no difference; Microsoft has pulled up the drawbridge.

While Internet Explorer is perfectly happy to let you download installers for desktop applications such as Google Chrome, attempts to click on the EXE file are met with a warning that “this app can’t run on your PC” and an invitation to visit the Windows Store.

The very presence of the desktop in Windows RT almost feels like you’re being taunted with what you’re missing out on. Why Microsoft didn’t remove the desktop altogether, and simply allow users to run full-screen instances of the Office apps from the Start screen, is bewildering. It has all the hallmarks of a bodge: a compromise reached to solve the conflicting priorities of the Windows and Office teams.

It’s also worth noting that the version of Office bundled with Windows RT is Home and Student – which means it isn’t licensed for business use, and that there’s no Outlook included in the deal. Try and share a document from Word via email and you’re presented with a stark warning message telling you there’s no email program installed, despite the presence of the Mail app in Windows 8. The Share charm provides no relief either: nothing can be shared from the desktop.

That said, the presence of almost fully featured Office apps is a considerable bonus: no other tablet has a complement of office apps that can compete with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, let alone bundled free with the operating system. We say almost fully featured, however, because a few notable features such as macros and, bizarrely, full SkyDrive integration are absent.

And when you try to push Office hard – fiddling with complex spreadsheets or adding high-resolution photos to heavily formatted Word documents – performance plummets, sometimes causing Office to dither like a contestant answering the final question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

Performance

This brings us to the overall performance of the Surface RT. On paper, the figures are mightily impressive: the 1,042ms recorded in the SunSpider browser benchmark is faster than any tablet that’s ever darkened our Labs door. Unfortunately, our Real World Benchmarks won’t run on Windows RT.

However, other performance indicators suggest the Tegra 3 processor inside the Surface doesn’t cope as well with Windows as even previous-generation Intel processors. Our Samsung 700T tablet, equipped with a Sandy Bridge 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M and 4GB of RAM, rebooted and returned to the password screen in 31 seconds; the Surface’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 with 2GB of RAM took 47 seconds.

When our Samsung tablet lands on the Start screen, it’s ready to get going without delay; the Surface RT stumbles through the first 30 seconds or so, like an ageing Windows XP installation in need of a refresh.

App performance is patchy too. Running two Windows 8 apps side by side can often cause performance to stutter; moderately demanding 3D games such as Pinball FX2 are occasionally juddery compared to the slick experience on our Samsung; even streaming tunes over Xbox Music can cause the Surface RT to wobble.

These performance hiccups might not be so apparent to users who haven’t experienced Windows 8 on an x86 device, and they’re certainly not showstoppers, but we do wonder if the performance trade-offs are too great, especially when you bring battery life into the equation.

The Surface RT lasted a shade over nine hours in our looping video test – a respectable, if not stellar duration for a tablet. The third-generation iPad lasted 12hrs 32mins, although a fairer comparison can perhaps be drawn with the Tegra 3-equipped Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which lasted 10hrs 8mins on its own, and 18hrs 5mins with the extra battery slice in its detachable keyboard. Alas, the Surface keyboards aren’t equipped with an extra battery.

Windows Store

Without access to desktop software, Surface RT owners are dependent on the apps available from the Windows Store. We’re a little nervous about drawing any firm conclusions about the quality of the Windows Store, because it’s an immature, evolving beast with new apps appearing on a daily basis. However, at the time of writing, there’s no doubt that the Windows Store falls a long way short of its iOS and Android rivals in terms of both quantity and quality of applications.

Big names are conspicuous by their absence: Twitter, Facebook, (no, the People app isn’t an outright replacement for dedicated clients), the BBC iPlayer, most national newspapers, Lovefilm, Spotify, Photoshop Touch… the list goes on. At the time of writing, we were struggling to even find a decent photo-editing app, which are (almost literally) ten a penny in the rival stores.

The presence of the full-blown version of Internet Explorer partly compensates for this lack of apps, and services such as iPlayer, Twitter and YouTube on the web offer more features than are available via apps on rival platforms (the “rewind from start” feature in iPlayer, for example).

There is a smattering of decent apps: the art package Fresh Paint, cloud photo effects studio PhotoFunia, and familiar favourites such as Skype, Kindle and TuneIn Radio all add to the package, but there’s no doubt the Windows Store is in urgent need of high-quality reinforcements.

Sign of things to come?

The Surface RT is an incredibly hard device to define. Microsoft’s first tablet is bold, unique and the most fully featured device of its type. No other tablet makes it as easy to get to work straight out of the box. No other tablet has its broad compatibility with a range of peripherals. No other tablet has such over-arching ambition.

Yet, it falls short in several respects. The ARM processor seems to struggle under the weight of Windows; the Windows Store is weaker than either of its two main rivals; and the boarded-up desktop is frustrating.

In the end, the Surface RT falls between two stools: on the one hand it isn’t as good a pure tablet as the iPad or the cream of the Android crop; on the other, the lack of backwards compatibility with traditional Windows desktop software means it cannot be considered as a genuine laptop replacement.

It remains an attractive device in its own right, but more than anything, it whets our appetite for the full Windows 8 version of the Surface that’s due to arrive early next year, which will have a fully unlocked desktop and all the benefits of a regular laptop. If you can hold out until the new year, we think it’s going to be worth the wait.

UPDATE

We’ve now been using the Surface RT for three months, from day one of the launch, so it’s time to update our review. After all, a fair amount has happened in that time: Office 2013 has moved out of Preview mode and into full release; thousands of new apps have been released in the Windows Store; and Microsoft has seen sense and dropped the price of the Surface RT significantly.

Except only two of those three statements is true: the Surface RT is stuck at a gargantuan price of £479 with the Touch Cover. With the Type Cover, it’s still £510. As each week passes, the more we speculate about the backroom negotiations that might have gone on between Microsoft and its partners: “keep it niche, keep it expensive” is surely the gist. KINKIE for short.

What marks the Surface RT out, though, is its design. And even three months later, this is something to behold and admire.

In that time, Microsoft has also released the final version of Office for Windows RT, and this has removed a number of irritations. For example, previously there was an option to share a document by emailing. Press this and you’d be told no email client had been configured. Now you’re told you can share to the cloud, publish a blog or do an online presentation. We’d have preferred it if Microsoft had simply made it possible to email a document.

Another massive improvement is synchronisation with SkyDrive. So long as you have already opened a file using the Surface RT (this saves a cached copy locally), you can work offline on that document and it will upload your changes once you reconnect. While we’d much prefer to have a local copy of our whole SkyDrive on the Surface RT, it immediately makes this a superior business tool to before. Previously we’d had to use a workaround to map our SkyDrive as a network drive.

Perhaps the biggest change for the Surface RT, though, is that our previous objections about laggy performance have disappeared. Office for Surface RT now feels extremely responsive in all the Office programs; no different to using Office 2013 on a modern PC. We don’t know exactly what Microsoft has tweaked under the hood (there have been a couple of firmware updates as well) but they’ve worked.

There are still areas where it suffers. Tough physics-based games such as Pinball GFX remain a little annoying to play – there’s a tiny delay between pressing down on the screen and the flippers reacting – but it’s much more bearable than before.

NEW VERDICT

One of our biggest original criticisms of the Surface RT was its lack of performance. That objection has mostly been wiped away by the firmware updates. The new version of Office also feels much better tied to the operating system, even if it still has those annoying restrictions.

As a standalone tablet, though, it still falls behind the iPad and the cream of the Android crop. There are some nice apps available for Windows RT, but there’s no strength in depth compared to its two major OS rivals.

Its other problem is the lack of locally mirrored versions of SkyDrive and Dropbox. While we do appreciate the improved synchronisation built into Office, this still depends on you opening the most recent copy of the document you want to work on before you head out of the office.

And we come back to the price. Windows RT is too immature to justify the same premium as a fourth-generation iPad, especially when to take full advantage of its benefits a keyboard becomes a must-buy accessory.

Another reason to think twice before buying the Surface RT is that the Surface Pro is very nearly here. While the price is set to be on the high side once more, it offers the distinct advantage of running Windows 8 rather than Windows RT.

Detail
Warranty	1 yr return to base
Physical
Dimensions	275 x 172 x 9.5mm (WDH)
Weight	680g
Display
Primary keyboard	On-screen
Screen size	10.6in
Resolution screen horizontal	1,366
Resolution screen vertical	768
Display type	Multitouch, capacitive
Panel technology	IPS
Battery
Battery capacity	2,330mAh
Core specifications
CPU frequency, MHz	1.3GHz
Integrated memory	32.0GB
RAM capacity	2.00GB
Camera
Camera megapixel rating	1.0mp
Focus type	Autofocus
Built-in flash?	yes
Built-in flash type	LED
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Other
WiFi standard	802.11n
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	no
Upstream USB ports	1
HDMI output?	yes
Video/TV output?	no
Software
Mobile operating system	Windows RT