Microsoft Surface Pro review

When Microsoft released the Surface RT at the end of last year, there were several complaints about the limitations of the Windows RT operating system, such as the limited range of apps. The Surface Pro rectifies this by coming with the full version of Windows 8 Pro, giving you much more flexibility when it comes to installing your own programs and apps. It’s available with 64GB or 128GB of storage, and it might just be the best Windows tablet ever made.

The Surface Pro is a little chunkier than the RT, but it runs full Windows 8

On the outside, very little has changed from the Surface RT. It’s a little chunkier than its predecessor, at 13.5mm thick instead of 9.5mm and weighing 916g rather than 682g, but it still has a beautiful edge-to-edge glass display and a gunmetal-grey magnesium chassis. The integrated kickstand is back, which flips out from the back panel, so you can stand the tablet on a desk. It’s still not height-adjustable, sadly, but we think it’s angled slightly better on the Surface Pro, making it much more comfortable to work on.

The integrated kickstand is neat and the 10.1in screen is excellent

Its 10.1in touchscreen is gorgeous and its Full HD resolution makes everything look razor sharp. At first we were concerned that such a high resolution on a screen this small would make using the touchscreen quite fiddly, but it was a joy to use and we had hardly any trouble tapping and opening individual files and web pages using the Start screen apps. On the Desktop it’s not quite as good, as menus and the Taskbar are quite small and a bit tricky to read; fortunately, you can increase the size of icons to make these easier to see and use. We found that the display has excellent viewing angles and we could still see what was onscreen from a variety of different positions.

The bundled Surface Pen lets you draw on the screen

Another way of interacting with the screen is by using the Pro’s new bundled in Surface Pen. It works in a very similar way to drawing tablet pens and the screen will sense it even when it’s 2cm away. It’s a little unintuitive to use when the Surface Pro’s propped up with the kickstand, but it’s great for sketching and taking notes when it’s lying flat. It won’t replace drawing tablets completely, as we found it wasn’t quite so accurate when we hovered the pen over the corners of the display. Unless it was angled perpendicular to the screen, the sensor would run away into the corner, making it difficult to close and minimise windows.

Pen issues aside, its image quality was excellent. Reds, greens and blues really popped out of the screen and whites were particularly bright. Blacks weren’t quite true black, but they were deep enough to make our high contrast images look stunning. We could see a very high level of detail in all of our test photos and colours were rich and vibrant throughout.

A DisplayPort output is useful, although you’ll most likely need to buy adaptors

Microsoft’s squeezed even more connections round the chassis this time as well. The USB3 port (it was USB on the RT), micro SDXC card reader and headphone jack match the ports on the RT, but the newest addition is a mini-DisplayPort output, so you can connect the Surface Pro to an external monitor. You’ll most likely need to buy a mini-DisplayPort to VGA, DVI or HDMI adaptors to use most monitors.

Inside, the Surface Pro has full laptop components, so it blows any other type of tablet out of the water when it comes to raw performance. There’s a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U processor powering the tablet, which we’ve seen in a lot of Ultrabooks. It gave the Surface Pro an overall score of 44 in our multimedia benchmarks. That’s one of the best scores we’ve seen for an Ultrabook and shows that this tablet is incredibly powerful.

Unsurprisingly, it also made mincemeat of our SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks, finishing in a super fast 232ms. Most tablets complete this test around the 1,000ms mark, including the Microsoft Surface RT, so this is easily one of the most capable tablets we’ve ever seen.

Its Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics chip gives it an edge over other tablets when it comes to gaming, too. It scored a huge 33,075 in the 3DMark Ice Storm test, which translates to well over 60fps, but it didn’t fare so well when we ran our normal laptop graphics benchmarks. It barely scraped 17fps in Dirt Showdown on High Quality settings at a 720p resolution, and we had to lower the settings to Low and disable the anti-aliasing to get a more playable 32fps. A bit of light gaming is possible, but you’ll want a laptop with a dedicated graphics card if you want to play more demanding titles.

Laptop power in such a small package means you don’t get a lot of battery life

Sadly, packing in so much power takes its toll on the Surface Pro’s battery life. We only managed 5h 33m in our light use laptop test with the screen set to half brightness, which is quite poor even for a laptop. It’s nowhere near the ten hours of use we managed from an iPad 4, but even half brightness on the Surface Pro is still quite bright compared to other laptops and tablets, so you’ll be able to squeeze a little more time out of it by lowering the brightness even further.

There’s a rear-facing camera, but the quality is pretty bad

Its rear-facing 0.9-megapixel camera wasn’t very good. Its maximum resolution is 1,280×720 and our outdoor shots had hardly any detail in them at all. Skies were over-exposed and colours had an almost greenish hue to them. Our indoor shots were equally washed out and it really struggled with lower lighting conditions. Its video capabilities were equally poor. Our test footage flickered constantly and it was flooded with noise as soon as we turned the lights off.

A small disappointment is the lack of bundled software. The Surface RT may have lumbered users with the Windows RT operating system, but its free copy of Office 2013 RT Home and Student went a long way in making it a more attractive tablet option. Unfortunately, Surface Pro users will have to buy Office 365 Home Premium separately, which is another £80 from the Microsoft Store (www.microsoftstore.com).

There’s no bundled physical keyboard, so the official Surface keyboard cover is another potential expense. The Surface Pro uses the same covers as the Surface RT, with a choice of the touch (£100) and type (£110) covers. The type cover is a proper keyboard that clips magnetically to the underside of the tablet, while the touch cover simply has lightly embossed touch-sensitive pads on a soft textured base.

The Type cover is our preference, but the Touch cover’s good and a little bit thinner

We definitely preferred using the type cover, particularly if we had to work on long documents, but the touch cover was surprisingly responsive and easy to use. Admittedly, it does feels like you’re typing on cardboard, but once we’d got used to it we were able to type at full speed within a matter of minutes. It’s much better than trying to use the onscreen keyboard, but we’d recommend spending the extra £10 on the type cover if you’re planning on using it the Surface Pro for a lot of word processing.

With a choice of keyboard, touchscreen and Pen, there are plenty of ways of controlling the Surface Pro

The Microsoft Surface Pro is the best Windows 8 tablet, but its battery life is slightly disappointing and it’s annoying that there’s no cover included for this price, which will set you back at least another £100. If you want the convenience of a tablet and the power of Windows, this is the model for you, but a fully-fledged Ultrabook is likely to be a better bet for most people.