Why surface rt

Within minutes we were typing at a brisk clip, making surprisingly few errors along the way. It helps that there are small indentations on the F and J keys just like a proper keyboard, marking the home position for each of your index fingers. The keys are also spaced well enough that you're unlikely to hit the wrong letter by mistake. It's no sweat if you do: the backspace and spacebar keys are easily found without looking down. In fact, as Microsoft was developing the product, it gradually widened the spacebar after some large-handed focus group testers found themselves mistakenly striking the touchpad instead.

It's the familiar layout and functionality that's the best part of the Touch Cover. If you're a regular PC user you'll quickly and happily find that all your typical keyboard shortcuts work exactly as you'd expect them. Arrow keys make for quick and easy navigation through text files, like the one in which this review was written. We're inclined to think that touch typists will come to grips with the Touch Cover more quickly than with a more tactile keyboard on another tablet OS.

Still, that tactility is something to overcome. The biggest challenge we had in acclimating to the Touch Cover was learning just how much pressure to apply. Use it for a few minutes and you'll realize you can tap the "keys" lightly and quickly while watching as full, perfectly spelled sentences flow onto the screen. Get too cavalier, though, and a letter will fail to register, forcing you to back up and try again with a little more force.

Again, though, you'll likely overcome such missteps after practicing for the prescribed business week. Because the Touch Cover is so photogenic -- it is available in five colors, after all -- you might not have known about the Surface's other keyboard, the Type Cover, so named for its tactile, conventional-looking keys.

Here, too, there's a slight learning curve, though perhaps gentler than the Touch Cover's. Once again, we found we could type quickly with a low error rate, though we never totally got used to the closeness of the keys -- they're packed very tightly and feature flat caps, meaning they very nearly bleed into one another. It's a bit of a shame that there aren't more Microsoft Stores: the ideal solution would be to wander in, play with both keyboards and see if you're a more of a Touch or a Type fan.

In either case, you'll find a small elf of a touchpad sitting beneath the spacebar. Our prediction: you won't bother with it much. It comes in handy if you're working in a desktop app like Explorer or Microsoft Word and need the kind of precision finger input can't offer.

Most of the time, though, we followed our intuition and just tapped on the far more responsive touchscreen. The trackpad does support two-finger scrolls, which you might use if you're looking at a website and don't want to get your finger in the way while you're reading -- or if you're a stickler for staying as close to the home row as possible. Just don't expect such gestures to be recognized in the smoothest of manners. And, in case you were wondering, closing either cover will disable the display on the Surface, much like the magnetic iPad covers from Apple.

But, we were rather disappointed by the lag here. There's a good three-second wait before the display pops back on after flipping open the cover. That compares unfavorably to the one second or less time on Apple's option. Not the end of the world, but a bit annoying if you're just flipping it open to take a quick peek at something. Since we're not yet aware of any benchmarks tailored to this operating system, we'll stand on this: Tegra 3 is more than capable of handling Windows RT's Live Tiles and Modern UI.

The tablet cold-boots in just under 25 seconds and launches apps briskly. It responds smoothly to taps and swipes, and we also found that the tablet is quick to respond if you open an app, change your mind and hit the home button before the app is finished loading.

That said, we did notice some occasional pauses when quickly swiping the left side of the screen to toggle between open apps. To be clear, it didn't matter how many apps we had open: in fact, we frequently lost count of how many were running.

We rarely bothered to manually close any and the machine never seemed to suffer for it. In short, the performance has a few limitations, but overall, Surface is fast, responsive and stable. The only benchmark we felt comfortable running is the browser-based and platform-agnostic SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. Here the Surface returned a very, very healthy average score of ms. That's nearly twice as fast as the latest iPad and nearly as quick as our record holder, the iPhone 5 , which burned through the test in ms when we reviewed it.

Indeed, the initial rendering of webpages is far faster than the iPad, with the main content and text popping in earlier. But, if you wait for all the content to filter in, overall page load times are comparable between the two. You caught the part earlier where we said this thing has robust battery life, right? How does nearly 10 hours sound? In our standard battery rundown test for tablets, which involves looping a locally stored video with WiFi on and brightness fixed at 50 percent, the Surface's The Surface with Windows Professional , which comes out in a few months and will cost a bunch more than the RT, but looks nigh-identical, both on the outside and in the OS.

So, it might be useful, then, to start by addressing some common misconceptions about Windows RT. First of all, contrary to what some readers might believe, it does, indeed, have a desktop, just like regular Windows. That said, you won't be spending much time down here on the desktop, since Windows RT can't run legacy programs written for traditional, xbased Windows systems.

In other words, while you can install an app like Photoshop on a full Windows 8 machine, you can't do it here, nor any other Windows application written since the dawn of the OS. Additionally, we have our doubts about whether anyone going forward will bother to write desktop apps versus those more optimized for running in the de facto Live Tile interface.

Still, the desktop can be a godsend in certain situations. Though this isn't "full" Windows, per se, it's still compatible with almost any USB-powered storage device or peripheral that you'd normally use with a Windows machine, a massive pile of legacy devices.

It really is lovely to plug in a USB drive and start dragging and dropping files. Or, feel free to connect that comfortable keyboard you've been using for a decade, or that old tank of an HP LaserJet that's still doing the business after all these years. These are the sorts of luxuries you might take for granted but will appreciate more as you start comparing the Surface to other tablets. In short, that USB connection isn't just a spec or a talking point: it means you can use this Windows tablet like a PC, whenever it's convenient for you.

Other than the fact that Windows RT can't run legacy apps, it looks and feels like Windows 8. There are two versions of IE, by the way: one on the desktop, and a more touch-friendly one that exists as a Live Tile. They do, at least, share bookmarks now. The desktop, too, is an app unto itself on the Start screen.

What's more, all the same gestures apply: swipe from the right to expose the Charm Bar, which contains options for searching content and adjusting system settings. Swipe from the left to toggle apps, and swipe from the top or bottom to view certain app-specific options, like playing a movie on loop.

That these options are all hidden means there is a bit of learning users will have to do before making the best use of their tablets, but once mastered you'll find options and commands are usually just a few taps away. From the Start Screen, you can just start typing to begin a search for something -- a trick you can use on the Windows Store home screen, too.

On the desktop, windows have a flatter, two-dimensional feel, meaning the old transparent bordering is a thing of the past. Things are, by default, a bit more finger-friendly than your average Windows desktop, with bigger buttons and menu options.

Video playback support is rather limited at this point. So, if you were hoping this machine would be as adept at playing back video files in any 'ol format you throw at it, like the x86 version of Windows is, you're bound for disappointment. When they do, you'll have to download it from the Windows Store. In fact, you'll be getting everything from the Windows Store. Should they be? They should be more specific on the product page, without forcing consumers to dig into support FAQ pages.

Vendors should be more explicit about actual available storage on product packaging, too. But getting only 16GB when you paid for a 32GB tablet? James A. James is also a content marketing consultant. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Ballmer was about to make another bet on software and hardware with a new tablet device called the Surface, running a new operating system.

The Surface tablet was a reaction to the runaway success of first Apple's iPad and the myriad of cheap Android tablets that followed, biting huge chunks out of the PC market along the way. While Microsoft's hardware partners had been building Windows tablets for years , they had never generated much momentum. Surface was Microsoft's way of proving that a Windows-powered tablet could be cool, and maybe even sexy, at a time when Windows tablets were dull and utilitarian.

Surface tension: The long, strange history of the Windows tablet. The launch of Surface Pro is Microsoft's most important attempt to build a tablet device. But the company has been trying to get this right for a long, long time. Read More. The hope was that with Surface, by taking control of the hardware and the software like arch-rival Apple Microsoft could come up with a Windows tablet that could take on the iPad and not spook PC makers too - hence Ballmer's emphasis on Microsoft's history with hardware.

The tablet went on sale in October, and soon analysts were predicting that Microsoft would sell millions of the device - the company was reported to have built somewhere between three and five million in the run up to the holiday season.

Almost immediately, the Surface failed to live up to these expectations: industry watchers said less than one million sold in the first quarter. Despite an initial positive reception from some, reviews were tepid.

Price cuts and various special offers followed as the company tried to reduce the levels of inventory it carried. It launched its first, the Lumia , in late And last month Microsoft confirmed that it had ceased production of both the Surface 2 and the Lumia the strange story of Windows RT is all but over, and it lasted just over two years. Rather than the hardware and software pushing each other on to greater things as Ballmer had hoped, it was a combination that left users underwhelmed.

Microsoft tablets through the ages: The good, the bad and the ugly, in pictures. A tour through some of most popular - and most unusual - Windows devices of the last two decades, from Tablet PCs to the Surface Duo.