The surface pro 2 is, like its predessor he sp1, meant to be everything to all men. It’s meant to be portable, laptop-like to allow work, tablet to allow play, powerful enough to do photography and gaming, good battery life for video watching.
The problem is that it doesn’t do it as we’ll as the iPad. I bought the surface pro 2 because I am a Microsoft fanboy, have been for many years. I refused to by an ipad because, quite simply, it was an ipad. A garden wall of Appleness which limited almost everything I wanted to do.
In reality the ipad is slick, easy, smooth, robust and does nearly every thing in would expect out of the surface pro 2. If I really wanted to do lots of typing, I probably would dust of the laptop and use that as the keyboard on both the ipad and sp2 isn’t ideal for that.
The interface and experience is ok with the sp2. It does most things ok, but unfortunately does quite a few things badly. For a start. Since November I have had to rebuild my sp2 three times, had to reformat it (recover drivers and delete applications) six times and I have had to replace it completely once.
My wife has an ipad two for several years. She has had to do absolutely nothing to it at all.
I now own an ipad mini. I have had to do nothing to it. It’s been fine. The experience on it is great.
The surface pro 2 is up against a slick and well built ipad. The sp2 does offer items the ipad can’t, office and running 64 and 32 bit applications for a start, but in this new world does that matter. Is that not the job of the laptop?
Unless Microsoft “pull their socks up” I can’t see the sp2 lasting. We are moving to cloud and doing it quickly. The Chrome book, although not there yet, will in the not too distant start to creep up on laptops, pcs and dare I say it, the apples.
Unless MS get the Surface experience sorted out, I really believe it’s days are numbered. It’s too heavy, too thick and worst of all, it’s far to unstable for use like an ipad and not laptopy enough to replace your ultrabook.