Microsoft Surface Pro 2 review

The Microsoft Surface Pro 2 is no longer Microsoft’s flagship Surface Pro tablet – that honour goes to the forthcoming Surface Pro 3 that’s due to launch at the end of August – but Microsoft has now confirmed that the Surface Pro 2 will be receiving a long overdue price cut across all four models in the months leading up to the Pro 3’s launch date, making it better value than ever before.

All models come with one of Intel’s fourth-generation Core i5 processors, but the 64GB version will now cost £569 (down from £719) while the 128GB and 256GB versions will cost £649 and £879 respectively (down from £799 and £1,039). The 512GB version has also had £150 shaved off its original price of £1,439 and will now cost £1,279. Sadly, buying one of Microsoft’s Touch or Type keyboard covers will still set you back £100 or £110, minimising just how much you’re actually saving if you want to be able to use the Pro 2 as a laptop. Still, the 128GB version on its own is still £200 cheaper than the Surface Pro 3’s Core i5 equivalent, and that doesn’t come with a Touch or Type cover either.

With these new prices, the Surface Pro 2 is still a good buy if you’re looking for a powerful Windows tablet. It runs the full 64-bit version of Windows 8.1 Pro and weighs a mere 900g. That’s a little lighter than its predecessor, but the tablet’s sleek gunmetal grey magnesium chassis is still a slim 13.5mm thick and has the same soft-touch texture on the back panel. The ports haven’t changed either, as you still get a single USB3 port, a micro SDXC card reader, a mini DisplayPort for connecting the Surface Pro 2 to an external display and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

The integrated kickstand also makes a welcome return. Like the Surface Pro, it flips out from the back panel to support the tablet when you want to prop it up on a table, but now it has two different positions instead of one. These angles are still fixed, so it’s not completely height-adjustable, but it certainly makes working on the Pro 2 more comfortable.

The 10.6in touchscreen is beautiful to look at with its wide viewing angles, but the edge-to-edge glass display now feels even smoother to the touch. The Pro 2’s 1,920×1,080 resolution can make it a little fiddly to tap small icons and internet tabs, but most of the time we had no problem at all opening individual files in Windows Explorer. Certain tasks such as using the scroll bar were more problematic, as it often completely failed to register our touch no matter where we put our finger on the screen.

PEN

Luckily, the Pro 2 also comes with a Surface Pen to make interacting with the screen that bit easier. It works much like other drawing tablet pens and the screen will sense it even when it’s 2cm away. We found it a little difficult to use with the original Surface Pro unless it was lying flat on our work surface, but the Pro 2’s wider kickstand angle now makes it much more comfortable to use when the tablet’s propped up in laptop mode.

The pen is much more precise than using your fingers, but the accuracy of its sensor still isn’t completely perfect. Like the Surface Pen that came with the Surface Pro, we experienced a few tracking issues when we held the pen at an angle near the top corners of the screen. Unless we held the pen perpendicular to the display, the sensor would run away from our pen into the corners of the screen, making closing and minimising windows a little tricky. We didn’t experience this problem anywhere else on the screen, but it was a little disappointing to see this hasn’t been fixed yet.

IMAGE QUALITY

The Surface Pro 2’s image quality was excellent. Blacks weren’t quite as deep as its bezel, but we can hardly complain when our colour calibrator recorded a superb black level reading of just 0.12cd/m². Whites were also bright and clean, and reds, greens and blues all popped out of the screen. This was surprising, as our colour calibrator revealed it was displaying just 62.8 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is fairly average for a laptop-tablet panel.

This didn’t make too much of a difference in our high contrast test photos, as each image looked fantastic. We recorded a high contrast ratio of 982:1 and we were able to pick out all the fine shadow detail in the darker areas of our images with ease. The screen’s glossy finish didn’t create too many reflections either thanks to its built-in ambient light sensor which automatically reduces the amount of glare onscreen based on your surroundings.

HASWELL

Inside, the Surface Pro 2 has one of Intel’s latest Haswell laptop processors, making it significantly more powerful than a regular Atom-based Windows 8 tablet. Its 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor is the same model that powers the Ultimate award-winning Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus laptop, and paired with 4GB of RAM, it scored a highly respectable 47 overall in our multimedia benchmarks. The Ivy Bridge-based Surface Pro scored 44, so it’s not a huge increase in processing power, but this is still incredibly powerful for a tablet.

Haswell’s improved integrated graphics also make the Surface Pro 2 a very capable gaming tablet. You’ll need to invest in a keyboard to play most games, but its Intel HD Graphics 4400 chip powered through our Dirt Showdown test with a smooth 24.4fps on High quality at 1,280×720. This isn’t quite fast enough to play 3D games at a comfortable speed, but we were able to get a much more respectable 43.1fps on Low quality. This is outstanding for a tablet, and we even broke through 38fps at its native 1,920×1,080 resolution on Low quality when we disabled the anti-aliasing.

All this power doesn’t come at the cost of battery life as we managed a huge 11 hours and 51 minutes in our light use laptop battery test with the screen set to half brightness. This is more than double the amount of battery life we managed with the original Surface Pro and it even beats a current fourth generation iPad.

Much like the original Surface Pro, the Surface Pro 2 doesn’t come with any bundled software. The Surface RT’s successor, the Surface 2, comes with Microsoft Office 2013 RT pre-installed, but that device’s Windows RT OS won’t let you install applications except those from the Windows Store. Some sort of provision of Microsoft Office 2013 on the Surface Pro 2 would have gone a long way in making its price a little more palatable, but overall we’d rather have the flexibility to install our own software.

KEYBOARD OPTIONS

There’s no bundled keyboard either, so you’ll have to factor in the added cost of a keyboard cover if you don’t already have one. The Surface Pro 2 uses the same keyboard covers as the Surface Pro, with a choice of Touch (£100) and Type (£110) covers, but Microsoft has also released new backlit Touch and Type covers to accompany the launch of the Pro 2.

We tried out the Touch Cover 2, which has lightly embossed touch-sensitive pads on a soft textured base. Initially, it still feels like you’re typing on cardboard, but once you get used to it you’ll be typing at near full speed in no time. The new illuminated backlight is also a nice addition, especially given that the practically silent nature of the keyboard is often a boon when working late or on a flight, but we’d still recommend buying the Type Cover (with its modicum of feedback) if you plan to do a lot of word processing.

CONCLUSION

The Microsoft Surface Pro 2 is a huge improvement over its predecessor and it remains the best Windows 8 tablet around. It may be being replaced with the Surface Pro 3 in just a few months, but Microsoft’s latest price cut is a welcome incentive to get one before it disappears completely. Microsoft hasn’t yet confirmed the exact type of processor that will be used in the Surface Pro 3, but we do know it will be a Haswell chip, so it’s unlikely that the Core i5 version of the Pro 3 will offer any major boost in processing power than what’s currently available in the Pro 2. Likewise, considering most modern Ultrabook convertibles still cost in excess of £1,000, the Surface Pro 2 is now even cheaper and more convenient than many of its hybrid rivals. If you want a great-looking tablet with the speed and power of a laptop, make sure you get a Surface Pro 2 before it’s too late.