I’ve bought this device exactly three months ago. I’m going to give you a thorough review of what’s good and what’s bad about it, and why, if you want a tablet that is also a kickass laptop, you might want to buy this… over the newest Surface Pro 3.

Why? Because the SP3 packs the same hardware. Same CPU, same GPU. At least, for the mid-range models. The most expensive SP3 (1800 euros) packs an Intel HD 5000, which is about ~30% more powerful than the HD 4400 of the other versions.

The SP2 is going to become cheaper due to the newer model being introduced, and it’s an alternative which is just as good, if not better! The only big difference is the screen resolution, its aspect ratio, and the new kickstand.

I bought the 128GB / 4GB RAM version along with the keyboard cover, all for around 1100€. Right off the bat, you can tell this is a pretty damn expensive device. Although some might argue, still not as expensive as Apple’s MacBooks. This price also included an optional warranty from the retailer.

I had a Nexus 7 and a standard HP laptop before this, and I hated having to deal with so many devices; desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet. The SP2 solved this for me by nicely combining the tablet and laptop into one.

HARDWARE IN GENERAL

Right off the bat, be warned: you are not going to get the full 128GB of storage. There isn’t really any bloatware that comes pre-installed, which is awesome, but you will still only end up with around 95GB free after all the updates and patches. Thankfully, there is a micro SD slot on the side (not plain SD! that sucks!). I’ll come back to this later.

You get a free Skype premium coupon (oops) as well as 2 years of 200GB SkyDrive storage. Which I don’t care about, because I already have a Dropbox Pro account.

I really like the speakers. They’re pretty powerful and there’s some good audio processing (which I wouldn’t recommend disabling) that makes it sharp, clear, and have weak, but decent-enough bass. They’re certainly much better than the speakers you find on smartphones, and despite the relatively small size of the screen, they have a good stereo separation.

There are pretty much no performance issues on this thing. Cold boots or waking up from hibernation is really fast. It doesn’t even feel like 10 seconds pass by. It makes me want to have a SSD in my desktop PC. I can use Photoshop CC and 3ds Max 2014 just fine. More demanding creation software (like Zbrush) will need you to be careful, unless you have the most expensive model with 8GB of RAM. This is the only situation where I have accidentally maxed out the RAM.

There is only one USB slot on this, so if you need to plug more than one thing, you better get a USB hub. I just use it for my mouse.

Gaming is possible on this! More on this further down the page.

DPI SCALING

Here’s the thing: you have 1920x1080 pixels… in a 11 inch screen. My desktop PC has two 1080p screens, but they’re 21 inches. You can see (if you squint) where this is going: pixels are a lot smaller. There are more dots per inch (DPI).

As a result, the Surface Pro 2 will scale up the UI by 150% by default. I’ve set it down to 125%, personally, because this is enough for me.

However, not all programs properly handle DPI scaling. In the end, some programs will end up scaling themselves up, but in a way that makes them slightly blurry. Instead of scaling UI elements, the fonts, the boxes… they scale the whole thing up, as if you took a screenshot and enlarged it by 150% in Photoshop using bilinear scaling. It’s not really great.

Other programs may attempt to properly use DPI scaling but end up looking uglier than the slightly-blurry method: Google Chrome is one of them. The font kerning becomes weird, the UI icons rescale themselves up using nearest-neighbor resizing (!!)… it’s terrible.

However, there is a better way: you can disable DPI scaling by going to the .exe’s properties, and going to the compatibility tab. Then what I did was set the default zoom in Chrome to 125% (this is something you do in the settings page, not directly in web pages).

Another much smaller set of programs will take your DPI scaling settings into account, but only apply it to certain elements of the user interface. 3ds Max is the only program I know that does this, but it’s not a big deal. It just results in some boxes being bigger, with the text inside them still being small.

Long story short: DPI scaling is a bit of a mess in Windows. This is something Linux and Mac OS were designed to handle from the start, whereas Microsoft was very late to the party.

This is something where the Surface Pro 2 might score some points over its newest iteration: the SP3 packs an even higher resolution screen, 2160x1440 in 12 inches. As a result, the situation would be worse in programs where scaling isn’t handled properly, whereas right now, you can still read (not too comfortably, but still) unscaled text at a normal viewing distance.

BATTERY LIFE & WEB BROWSING

You will get around 3 to 4 hours doing active web browsing on medium brightness on the balanced power plan. This is pretty decent considering this is about what you’d get on your average smartphone or tablet. You might be able to bring that up to 5 hours using the power saving plan, but it can make scrolling choppy.

Internet Explorer is far more optimized than Chrome here. Playing back Flash videos, I’ve noticed frames dropping in fullscreen mode. This didn’t happen with IE. From what I could tell, looking at the task manager, it could use more than one core to render a tab (and the video), whereas Chrome would restrict iself to, and max out a core, which wasn’t enough, especially using the power-saving battery plan. Internet Explorer was buttery smooth at all times. It’s also a lot more touch-screen friendly than Chrome.

There is something that bugs me for a tablet/laptop hybrid: we are used to turning the screen of our smartphones and tablets off as soon as we’re done using the device, leaving them running nonetheless. There is no such option with the Surface Pro: the power button is for sleep mode. One compromise is setting the screen time-out to one minute (two while plugged in). I also do this on my desktop PC to save power.

Speaking of sleep mode: it’s not reliable. I can’t pinpoint exactly what’s causing it, but the device sometimes wakes silently right back up. For this reason, you may want to use hibernate instead of sleep, which is barely any slower because this is running on a SSD.

The good thing about Windows is that you can fully customize the power plans. I have shortened the screen time-outs, I’ve made it so that it doesn’t go in sleep mode if it’s plugged in… under the balanced power plan, I have set the GPU to “balanced” instead of “full power saving” when not plugged in, and “performance” instead of “balanced” when plugged in…

You have lots of controls. There is however one weird thing that is not explained anywhere: the CPU’s frequency scaling depends on the selected power plan, no matter which minimum and maximum percentage there is. It’s like Android’s CPU governors. If you’re on the high performance plan, but you have set the minimum frequency to be 5% (750mhz), it will never go down from the maximum (2300mhz). If you’re on power saving, it will almost never leave the lowest frequency when plugged in, and it will stick to it on battery. On balanced mode, however, the frequency goes up and down like you’d expect, whether you’re plugged in or not. So you’ll probably want to stick to this one.

You can do some gaming while not being plugged in; the battery should last at least 1h20 (using the balanced power plan and fairly high screen brightness).

FIRMWARE AND DRIVERS

This is something that definitely deserves its own section: the firmware support is really bad. Or maybe it was really bad, because almost all issues have been fixed.

There used to be a bug where having a SD card in the slot would cause random high CPU usage from the USB 3.0 ACPI management. It was totally random and would occur after the device woke up from sleep once. After lots of little firmware updates in the past months (which, amusingly, have all been marked as being from March 11th), this problem has finally been fixed.

There is another issue where you may end up with color banding / fringing out of nowhere, and to fix this you need to just go nudge a slider in the Intel control panel.

A few times, I found my SP2 shut down after leaving it (plugged in) to play music overnight. It crashed a few times like this, but this hasn’t happened in a while, so I presume it was fixed in one of the firmware updates.

I’ve heard that Bluetooth isn’t very reliable on the Surface Pro 2 when used at the same time as WiFi, causing stuff like bluetooth mice dropping out when there’s lots of WiFi traffic.

Nowadays, the situation is better than it used to be, but it’s disappointing that it’s still like most Windows PCs, where you need to google for solutions to weird problems. The Surface Pro line is meant to be Microsoft’s equivalent to the Google Nexus devices, and it’s clearly not as good in that regard.

VIDEO GAMES

Despite only having an Intel i5 2300 and an Intel HD 4400, you can play games on this! In general, new-ish games run fine at 720p, on medium-to-high settings, and locked at 30 frames per second. (because it’s better to have a rock-solid 30fps than something that keeps wobbling between 30 and 60)

The video chip seems to be constrained by memory bandwidth and not by shader units, to a point where it’s lopsided. Enabling any sort of anisotropic filtering will lower your framerate in games, so you should stick to trilinear texture filtering only whenever possible. Interestingly, the framerate cost between Aniso x2 and x16 is the same.

Here are some games that I’ve personally tried:

Dota 2: 720p, locked at 30fps (using fps_max 30), all settings set to high except animate portrait. It sometimes drops a little during teamfights with lots of effects, but it’s otherwise great. I have played (and won) my longest game ever yersterday on the SP2.

Torchlight 2: 720p, 60fps vsync enabled. I couldn’t find a way to cap it to 30, so to avoid a wobbly framerate, I dialed down the particles and shadows to medium.

Counter-Strike Global Offensive: 720p, all settings set to high except texture filtering set to trilinear and shadows set to medium. Runs somewhere between 30 and 60fps depending on the map, but rarely goes down to 30.

The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: 720p, settings between medium and high. This didn’t run too well, wobbling below and above 30 frames per second. It was still very much playable, however.

You can look for “[game title] [surface pro 2]” on YouTube if you want to know how your favorite game runs on it. The bottom line is this: unless it’s Crysis, it will run pretty good on medium to high settings, and if it doesn’t, you can always dial down to the lowest settings. There’s a lot of margin.

Windows will sometimes complain about being on low memory while gaming (you will hear the “ding” sound while playing), even though there’s like 2GB of RAM left. I suppose this is some bug/quirk in how shared video memory is allocated. The warning can safely be ignored.

There is something important you need to know: you will have to manually update the Intel GPU drivers, because the ones that ship with the device are old (from last February) and have incompatbilities with some games. In the case of Dota 2, some particle effects used to glitch out, and then the game straight up started crashing every time, until I manually updated the drivers.

Short guide on how to do this: download the latest driver from Intel in .zip form, unzip the folder, right click on the Windows start button, device manager, display adapters, right click on Intel HD, driver tab, update driver, browse my computer, “let me pick from a list” option, click “have disk” button, browse to the unzipped folder and select the .inf file in the Graphics folder.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

The keyboard cover has back-lit keys! They magically lit up when your fingers barely start to brush them. Not sure how this even happens.

You can use Fn + caps lock so that the function keys work as F1, F2, F3… and not their shortcuts unless you press Fn. It’s the opposite by default. There is a hidden Fn combination to change screen brightness: Fn + del. and Fn + backspace.

One of the things I like the most about this device is the size. Laptops are hella bulky, this thing is not. It’s small and fairly thin (but not too much, a little less than 2cm). Standard laptops give you chargers you could use as BDSM gear because the cord is 3 kilometers long. This isn’t the case with the SP2, and it’s just the right length. But the best thing about the charger is that the power brick has a USB plug on it! So you can use it as a 2-in-1 charger! I keep my phone plugged into it when I connect to the Internet using tethering (which I am doing right now, writing this article from my internet-less grandparents’ home)

This is all the hardware I need when I travel away from home, and it all easily fits in a small backpack, with lots of room to spare. I love not having to carry a laptop case with me.

The kickstand has 2 positions, one where it stands at an almost-vertical angle, and one where it’s closer to 45°. It’s pretty good, but the weak point of the kickstand + keyboard cover combo is that the whole ensemble is not rigid, so you want to use this in bed, it’s a little tough. Sitting down on chair with the device on your legs is okay, though.

The pen that comes with it is a Wacom pen, and it’s pretty nice… however, there is an issue where the corners (and edges) of the screen are woefully inaccurate, so you’ll have to make a conscious effort to think of the pen nub as a kind of mouse to select things in menus. You will need to grab the latest driver from Wacom for pressure sensitivity to work in Photoshop etc.

The one thing I don’t like about the pen, besides the corner accuracy, is that there is no good place to keep it. There isn’t a slot to slide it inside or anything, but it does have a magnetic slot so that it can attach to the same place the charger plugs into. It’s lackluster.

CONCLUSION

The Surface Pro 2, a little expensive (especially the keyboard cover), but the power it packs within its small form is worth it in my opinion.

The SP3 being released will almost certainly make the SP2 cheaper. If you can grab the 128GB/4GB (or 256GB/8GB!) version at a bargain, go for it! The newest iteration sticks the same hardware on a higher resolution screen, so there are no big reasons to upgrade.

Early reviews of the Surface Pro 3 are also showing that problems from the previous generations are either not solved or popping back up (such as the unreliability of sleep mode).

Hopefully Microsoft will decide to finally put Intel’s awesome Iris video chips in their next iteration.