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Microsoft Surface Review, Part 2: Battery Life, Multi-Monitor, And More
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1. Microsoft Surface: Battery Life Analysis

Last week we published our first impressions of and experiences with Microsoft's new Surface tablet in Microsoft Surface Review, Part 1: Performance And Display Quality. In that piece, we covered the platform's underlying (familiar) Tegra 3 SoC, a handful of browser-based benchmarks, and an analysis of display performance at maximum brightness.

With one more week of tinkering under our belts, we're ready to follow-up with even more data you can use as you decide whether the Surface is the tablet/notebook go-between it's being made out to be. We have a comprehensive look at battery life with the tablet at maximum brightness, and then normalized to 200 nits, a second analysis of Windows RT, a demonstration of external monitor support, initial experiences gaming on the Surface, and additional discussion of display quality.

Let's just right into our exploration of battery life!

Battery Life & Recharge Benchmarks (Background Info)

The Surface does surprisingly well in our first test, which looks at battery life during the playback of an H.264-encoded movie at 50% volume. Microsoft's tablet lasts for more than seven hours, besting a number of notable tablets, but trailing behind some of today's most popular models like the third-gen iPad and Nexus 7.

As some of you have noticed in past tablet reviews, our Web browsing benchmark is more taxing than the video playback workload. This is because most SoCs are able to offload the most intensive aspects of the decode pipeline. Moreover, we disable Wi-Fi in that test. Meanwhile, the browsing metric scripts a text-heavy site to reload every six minutes. Wi-Fi is active, and it doesn't help to have MP3 playback going at the same time.

As a result the Surface touches six hours of battery life in our second suite, topping a number of the tablets it previously lost to.

Here's the thing, though: we ran those figures with each tablet's display set to maximum brightness. Some folks are going to use their devices like this, making it an interesting comparison. However, it's not a scientific-enough measurement to stand alone because each tablet's screen is different, resulting in different maximum brightness levels.

So, we take the extra time to go back and run the same tests with each tablet fixed to the same luminance level. This is problematic in its own right, since we'd be inclined to dial up the brightness on a low-gamut display. At least both schools of thought are represented though, right?

Normalized Brightness Benchmarks

Standardized to 200 cd/m2 (or nits), the Surface lasts for 10 hours playing back H.264-encoded video content. Although that's an hour less than the Nexus 7, the delta between both devices is narrower here than it was at maximum brightness.

When we switch over to Web browsing and music playback, the Surface runs for two hours longer than it did at maximum brightness. However, it still trails the Nexus 7, third-gen iPad, and Kindle Fire HD.

Powerful graphics architectures make lightweight gaming a reality on today's tablets and smartphones. Unfortunately, it's difficult to pin down cross-platform tests because there are so few games that run on iOS, Android, and Windows RT. Riptide GP is a rare exception, which makes it possible for us to use the game to test battery life. Our measurement is pretty simple: we play back the demo loop until each device shuts down.

We've found this game to be unforgiving of Tegra 3-based tablets because it's specifically optimized for Nvidia's SoC, taxing it with additional quality enhancements. If you game on the Transformer Prime or Nexus 7, you'll see additional details like water splashes that don't show up on other tablets. Interestingly, though, the Surface outperforms the other Tegra 3-based models, even exceeding the third-gen iPad's battery life, all the while giving you better visuals.

Recharging

As the Surface delivers comparable battery life as Apple's third-gen iPad, it also impresses by enabling much speedier recharging times.

For every minute you spend browsing the Web and playing music on the iPad, you need to spend the same amount of time charging it back up. Six hours of battery life, six hours of charging.

Meanwhile, the Surface cuts that time in half. You can browse the Web at full brightness for six hours, and then spend three hours to charge back up to 100% capacity again. We're only missing one piece of this power puzzle: what impact does charging more quickly have on the Surface's battery's longevity?

2. Windows RT And Office: Fully-Featured, To A Fault?

Touch Input Response: Windows Surface vs iPad 3

It's all well and good to convey our impressions of the Surface's responsiveness (very good, in case you're wondering). But we also recorded video from a high-speed camera demonstrating how quickly the Surface responds to touch input compared to Apple's third-gen iPad. The typing is a little tough to make out, but you should see Microsoft's tablet reacting faster.

Windows RT is a bonus for anyone already making the move to Windows 8. By enabling a mobile operating system that nearly clones the desktop version, switching between a Surface and your desktop should be more natural than learning the ins and outs of Mac OS and Android, or Windows 7 and iOS. 

Microsoft seems to have learned a lot from its competition in terms of usability. We don't need a separate file browser for Windows RT like we do under Android. On the Surface, you simply open My Computer. It's a much more Windows-like experience and you aren't constantly reminded that, oh yeah, I'm using a pared-down mobile device.

Microsoft Surface: IE10 Multitabbing Experience

Of course, you can't escape the fact that you are, in fact, still using a pared-down mobile device. If you try to tab around in IE10 like you would on the desktop, you're going to find yourself frustrated. Just try opening three tabs, one of them a Flash- or JavaScript-heavy site. Switching between them is going to be downright sluggish, and it's common to see windows that don't respond. Your only solution is to wait for the tablet to catch up or close IE10 altogether and start over.

On the bright side, you can watch streaming YouTube videos at 1080p, either giving you higher-bitrate video on the Surface's display or higher resolution on an external display. Compare that to the 720p cap imposed on Android and iOS. The only limitation we ran across is an inability to play back 4K video, rare though they may be.

We're really like to see Microsoft open up the Windows RT ecosystem to competing Web browsers, though. Although IE10 is an impressive step forward from IE9 (just wait for our upcoming Web Browser Grand Prix comparing Windows 7 and 8), we like the utility offered by some of the other options out there. For instance, Chrome and Firefox benefit from AdBlock. IE10 lacks an extension as robust, which sucks because blocking Flash-based advertisements would go a long way to improving performance on popular websites.

Just as we're able to bog the Surface down with aggressive Web browsing, so too can we slow the system down with Office Home & Student RT Preview. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are very potent tools, and they run similarly on Microsoft's tablet as they do on the desktop. Surely an enthusiast is going to find the threshold where even a complex Word document or Excel spreadsheet overwhelms the Surface's hardware. But we got to that point extra fast in OneNote.

The software is intended to be used like a virtual notebook for organizing ideas, thoughts, and agendas. If you're a student, we can see how the Surface and OneNote would be a great combination. Indeed, the software lends itself to multiple sections for each class, with a page dedicated to every lecture. Unfortunately, once you have two or three sections, OneNote slows down substantially (especially if you drop in images and diagrams). In a classroom, where you're typing like mad to keep up with the professor, a Tegra 3-powered Surface simply can't keep up the way we're hoping the Surface Pro will.

Mircrosoft Surface: Scrolling in IE10 & Office 2013 RT

3. No More Cloning: The Surface Supports An Extended Display!

Amazon Kindle Fire HD: Sorry, we can only clone your desktopAmazon Kindle Fire HD: Sorry, we can only clone your desktop

We've mentioned this on multiple occasions, but the reason we liked the Surface so much in Part 1 of our evaluation was that it bridged the space between tablets and notebooks, rather than simply going head-to-head with devices like the iPad and Nexus 7.

One thing you'll commonly see in our tablet reviews is complaints about multi-monitor support. You can hook Android- and iOS-based devices up to external displays, but they simply mirror whatever is up on the tablet's screen. What's the use in that? Giving presentations, perhaps. But we'd much rather see an option to extend the display for productivity-oriented purposes.

Samsung Chromebox: Sorry, we can only clone your desktopSamsung Chromebox: Sorry, we can only clone your desktop

Asus' Transformers have those clever docking stations. But they're Android-based, so they can't really be the notebook replacements we'd want. Samsung's Chromebox? Same thing. Although they're light-duty desktops able to support a pair of 30" screens, Chrome OS limits you to mirrored screens.

Microsoft Surface: We'd be happy to extend your desktop!Microsoft Surface: We'd be happy to extend your desktop!

Microsoft's Surface fixes that maddening limitation by giving you the flexibility to either clone your desktop (yawn) or extend it (yay). In fact, once you plug a monitor into the tablet's microHDMI port, you have all of the options available on a desktop. In reality, there's only so much you can do on the Surface's 10.6" screen. But the addition of a second monitor opens the door to much more efficient multitasking. If you want three instances of IE10, Word, Skype, and PowerPoint all open at the same time, you can do that.

Microsoft Surface: Multi-Monitor Experience

Of course, any trouble we caused by deliberately bogging down performance on the previous page gets exacerbated. Resizing frames and scrolling down a YouTube page are both tasks that suddenly start stuttering.

This seems to be a case where Microsoft is enabling so much functionality on its ARM-optimized operating system that today's SoCs are simply sagging under the load. Don't get us wrong. We like this. Hardware will continue to evolve. And even if Nvidia's Tegra 3 doesn't always serve up the smooth performance we expect in a desktop environment, we'd rather have the freedom to open multiple applications on-screen at the same time or extend out to a second panel.

4. Is The Surface Any Good For Gaming? First, We Need Apps

We continue to be impressed by the quality of games emerging for tablets and smartphones (though of course they don't even come close to what you get as a PC enthusiast on the desktop). Nevertheless, SoC vendors are increasingly arming their designs with more capable graphics processing.

Just because the Surface is a new tablet doesn't mean the hardware inside it is foreign to us. We already have a fair sense of what Nvidia's Tegra 3 hardware can do (check out Snapdragon S4 Pro: Krait And Adreno 320, Benchmarked for more comparison date between today's top mobile-oriented SoCs).

Since it's running under a recently-released operating environment, though, we have to play the waiting game, yet again, as developers add one more platform to support.

Riptide on Tegra 3 & AndroidRiptide on Tegra 3 & Android

The Infinity Blade series for iOS and Riptide for Android are two of the best-looking mobile titles we've seen thus far, and we're confident that gaming on tablets and smartphones is only going to get more popular, especially if you have a kid living under your roof. According to Nielsen, 77% of children with access to a tablet use it for gaming. That number might not be as high for adults, but as hardware evolves and developers become more diverse in their offerings, the experience will certainly become more compelling.

Riptide on Tegra 3 (WinRT)Riptide on Tegra 3 (WinRT)

It's hard to say how long it'll take before Microsoft's Windows Store boasts similar-sized libraries of games as the App Store or Google Play. However, sometime in the last few days Vector Unit added Riptide for Windows 8/RT, and it looks every bit as good on the Surface as it did on the Nexus 7 (the game is available for iOS too, but without the Tegra-specific optimizations).

We can't ignore the lack of high-quality games on the Windows Store, though. You can play Angry Birds, sure. But we're interested in titles that really leverage Nvidia's Tegra 3 to its full potential. We'll need to revisit this topic in the future, and hopefully before the Surface Pro, er, surfaces and woos us away with its much more flexible ecosystem.

5. Color Gamut Revisited: Illustrating The Surface's Weakness

In Microsoft Surface Review, Part 1: Performance And Display Quality, we specifically complained that the Surface's color saturation (that is, the range of colors it can reproduce) is just 41% of the AdobeRGB 1998 and 60% of the sRGB gamut. You might have seen that, scratched your head, and said, "Geez, OK. Whatever."

Admittedly, it's difficult to explain our results without a few pictures. So we're back to help clarify what the Surface's screen means to you.

For the most part, you won't notice an issue with the Surface, even when it's sitting side by side next to a third-gen iPad, which we've praised in the past. The Surface's contrast ratio is so high that its weak gamut is not obvious.

But if you dial back brightness in order to achieve the better battery life we demonstrated on page one, Microsoft's tablet doesn't look as hot. Readers and vendors alike want to see tablet and smartphone screens tested at the same luminescence, so we oblige by presenting performance a couple of different ways. But there are consequences. Behold...

Both tablets are calibrated to the same brightness setting. However, colors appear lighter because of the level of color saturation. For example, on the third-gen iPad, the blue morning glory appears richer and more vivid, since the display can reproduce dark blues more accurately while still providing enough differentiation from the lighter border regions. If you look at the Surface, the same areas are harder to tell apart.

In short, any image with a wide array of colors won't look as pretty, and you're not going to come away as impressed by the Surface's screen quality compared to some of the other tablets we've reviewed.

6. We Like The Surface; We're Waiting For Surface Pro

Apple’s original iPad was introduced in April of 2010. Since then, we've only considered one tablet a serious competitor, and that was Google's Nexus 7. In fact, in The Nexus 7 Review: Google's First Tablet Gets Benchmarked, the plucky little seven-incher won the first award we've ever given to a tablet.

Thus far, though, we've generally regarded tablets as toys. Well, perhaps not toys in a literal sense, but we typically use them around our houses for playing mainstream games, browsing the Web, listening to music, and watching video. Those are all very common tasks, but they aren't productivity-oriented.

Tons of me-too products have found their way their way through our lab. The Nexus 7 was the one we liked most. But it remains a pure tablet. Even if it's more comfortable to hold than a big 10"+ model, more affordable than anything Apple could conceive, and part of a mature software ecosystem in Google Play, there are certain things it just doesn't do. 

And then the Surface dropped into our lab, right on the day our pre-order promised it would. 

Suddenly we had many of the luxuries we enjoy on the desktop. Only, we were using a tablet. Wait, whaaat? It immediately became possible to do things and work in ways that simply hadn't been possible previously. And for all of the hate Windows 8 has been receiving in the enthusiast community, we're switching over to it in the lab, and it's actually nice to see a common interface on our most powerful desktops and on the Surface.

Granted, Microsoft's first foray into the tablet space is not without its faults. Hardware-wise, the display is merely adequate, and Windows RT does so much that Android and iOS don't do that it's plenty easy to overwhelm Nvidia's Tegra 3 if you try using the tablet like an enthusiast might be tempted to. On the software front, there's Microsoft's Windows Store to contend with. No legacy Windows software allowed. In fact, only Microsoft's applications will run on the Windows RT Desktop. That's a pretty tough pill to swallow when we've just spent several more pages praising the company's work on the operating system itself.

Surface Multi-tasking: Watching A Movie, Browsing, Word ProcessingSurface Multi-tasking: Watching A Movie, Browsing, Word Processing

With the few things we dislike aside, we continue to be bullish about using Microsoft's Surface as a replacement for the Ultrabooks and MacBook Airs we carry around with us to trade shows and meetings, along with the tablets we use around the house when we get home. Flip the cover up and drag our fingers around the way we'd use a tablet? Sure. Drop the Type Cover down, snap out the kickstand, and bang out some email? Definitely. Hook up a second monitor for some extra workspace in the office? Yes, please! We certainly can't say the same for any iOS- or Android-based device. 

One of the Surface's biggest advantages is its ability to multitask effectively. And yet one of its most glaring weaknesses is the Windows Store, with its limited selection of Windows RT-ready apps. We have to hesitate on a recommendation knowing the Surface Pro is coming soon. We're only afraid of what it's going to cost, given a steep price tag on a Surface with the Type Cover we like so much.