A Video Demo of the Surface Pro from the Microsoft Launch
A look at Microsoft's tablet that runs full Windows.
On Saturday, February 9, Microsoft unleashed its second salvo against the dominance of Apple’s iPad in the post PC tablet world, the Surface Pro. Like the Surface RT, which was released last year to lukewarm reviews, the Surface Pro is designed and built by Microsoft, and is a full Windows 8 Pro device, unlike the Windows RT running tablet.
We were at the Toronto Microsoft Store for the launch on Saturday, and while there we were able to video a short demo of the Pro. Mitch Garvis, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist, took us through some of the Pro’s features, and showed us how the Surface Pro has changed the way he works. You can check out the video below.
In the video he addresses some of the issues people have brought up about the Surface Pro. For example, with regards to the usable storage on the Pro’s SSD, he shows how you can claim some of it back by moving the recovery partition to an external device. One topic that wasn’t brought up, though, was the Pro’s 3-hour battery life (in fairness we didn’t ask), which is probably, in our opinion, the tablet’s biggest weakness when compared to both other tablets and Ultrabooks.
Have you bought a Surface Pro? If not, do you plan to? Let us know in the comments below!


It has all the good stuff about the Surface Pro, without the two downsides: "Short" battery life, and non-adjustable viewing angle (inflexible kickstand).
I don't consider weight to be a downside. 3-4 lbs is nothing to me. (I'm a man btw)
How does the stylus/handwriting work? The shut-off-the-touchscreen feature sounds great in theory, but I'm really wondering how it does in practice.
Also hoping for extra USB port to plug mouse into on Surface 2 Pro.
I checked out the Surface Pro at the MS store over the weekend. The pen input was my main focus, and I'll say I was impressed. I've used over pen inputs before, and they tended to lag when writing with them, but this was pretty responsive and smooth. I could definitely see taking notes with this or drawing or whatever. I was able to write fairly finely, which made it seem more like taking notes with a regular pencil, as opposed to a crayon. I could write comfortably with my hand resting on the screen and there was absolutely no issue with it wanting to read my hand as an input. Yet I could easily switch to using my finger to slide the page up and down to get more space to take notes. I was using OneNote, btw, but I also tried it with the Fresh Paint app. Both worked very well. In OneNote, you could just flip the pen around and use the back to erase, and that worked very well, too. Pretty impressive.
I agree with Vort, i didnt think i would be using the pen as much as i have been. OneNote is a joy to take notes in, I used it in our daily operations call today to jot a few things down. I suck at drawing but the sketch app i downloaded is still pretty neat. And you can pen input into pretty much any textbox by selecting the pen input keyboard.
Having two USB 3.0 ports would be awesome. Nevertheless, there are always hubs:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1HD0HZ1777
I'm just happy there's at least ONE port for $1000 (looks disapprovingly at iPad 4) .
That's actually really good, if you get 6-7 hours on Power Saver mode, we're not huuuuugely off an RT with a lot more bells and whistles!