Tech

Surface Pro: Overpriced tablet, half an Ultrabook, or yet another Tablet PC?

The price says Ultrabook, the form factor says tablet—neither fits well.

Ars Staff – Dec 3, 2012 2:10 pm | 322

Microsoft designed its Surface tablet specifically for Windows 8. Credit: http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/surface-with-windows-8-pro/home

$899 is a lot of money for a 64GB 10.6-inch tablet. It’s $70 more even than the most expensive iPad—and that comes with 3G/LTE support and GPS. But that’s the price Microsoft has set for the low-end Surface with Windows 8 Pro.

$1028 (to include a Type Cover keyboard; $1018 if you plump for the Touch Cover instead) isn’t, however, a huge amount of money for a 64GB 10.6-inch Ultrabook with a 1920×1080 multitouch screen and stylus, all in a package that weighs about 2.5-2.6 pounds total and comes in at 20mm thick. Microsoft said Surface Pro would be priced like an Ultrabook, and it is.

Four to 4.5 hours of battery life is just plain lousy for a tablet—any tablet. Tablets are widely expected to have “all-day” battery life. That means eight hours at a minimum; ideally nine to 10.

On the other hand, four to 4.5 hours of battery life is not too bad for a $1028, almost-11-inch laptop. It’s a little on the low end, perhaps—the 11-inch MacBook Air gets about five hours—but it’s by no means horrible. The 1920×1080 screen, conversely, puts it at the higher end of the market. So too does the build quality and the digitizer/pen input.

Compared to any of the popular tablets—the various iPads, the Nexus 7, Amazon’s range—the Surface Pro is absurdly overpriced and its battery life is pathetic. Compared to an Ultrabook, it’s not that bad: a little ahead in some ways, a little behind in others.

The thing is, in spite of its pricing, the Surface Pro isn’t an Ultrabook. The kickstand and the keyboard covers work pretty well if you’re at a desk or a table, but they come with worst-in-class touchpads (they’re netbook size and quality, rather than Ultrabook size and quality). That fixed screen orientation is also less usable when a desk of an appropriate height isn’t available.

This makes Surface Pro an awkward sale. Buyers will inevitably compare Surface Pro to other devices on the market that look similar and appear to fit the same basic constraints—that means comparing to tablets, and this will be catastrophic. Microsoft needs to persuade buyers to regard Surface Pro as not another tablet but as more like an Ultrabook. But what an odd kind of Ultrabook it is.

Surface RT was difficult to categorize, and Surface Pro, if anything, exacerbates that difficulty. Surface RT is very similar to an iPad in terms of size, weight, and battery life, but it offers a little something more than a straight tablet: it has the keyboard covers, the desktop, and four of the Office applications. Although Surface RT calls itself a PC, the lack of software compatibility leaves it impossible to compare to the PCs that went before it.

Surface Pro, however, falls down hard in comparison to other tablets due to its weight, price, and battery life. It compares much more favorably to Ultrabooks, and yet its form factor is identical to that of Surface RT (just a little thicker and a bit heavier). It’s shaped, sized, and built like a tablet, but you can’t actually use it like a tablet. It’s too heavy, and the battery will give out mid-way through your working day.

But those keyboard covers and desktop really come into their own on the Surface Pro, because it’s running Windows 8 Pro on a fast x86 processor. As such, it will be compatible with virtually any Windows application you throw at it. Surface Pro is a PC. It doesn’t look like a traditional PC and, with those touchpads, you might not want to use it as a traditional PC. But on the inside, that’s what it is.

Surface RT offers a “tablet plus” experience. The value you ascribe the “plus” depends on the value you ascribe Office. If you need those capabilities, it’s a huge bonus; if you don’t, the Surface is a curious beast, wedding a competent touch user interface to a vestigial, anachronistic desktop.

But what is Surface Pro? It’s not “tablet plus plus,” taking the basic concept of the Surface RT and adding even more extra value. It compares too unfavorably with other tablets in a number of key areas. But equally, it’s not the “PC plus” that Microsoft argues is the real future of the PC and tablet markets. Its PC capabilities and aspirations are undermined by being shoehorned into a tablet form factor.

The end result is a product that does a big chunk of what a tablet can do and a big chunk of what a PC can do, but it’s not a perfect replacement for either. If Surface Pro is held up against conventional tablets, the result will be catastrophic, but the comparisons with Ultrabooks aren’t clear-cut either.

The Surface Pro is not the only Windows 8 device that has been announced that makes this kind of compromise. A wide range of hybrids is either for sale now or will be soon. Just look to the Samsung Ativ Smart PC Pro and the Asus Transformer Book (which wed fast CPU tablet units to dockable clamshell keyboards), or convertibles such as the Sony Duo 11 and Dell XPS 12 Duo (which use hinges and other mechanisms to hide their keyboards behind their screens). But none of these competing devices are as tablety as Surface Pro: they generally have hinges for flexible screen positioning. They’re also generally thicker and heavier.

Surface Pro does have some direct precursors, but they’re devices such as HP’s Slate 500. They’re the “Tablet PCs” that Microsoft has been trying to promote for the last ten years (with little success). Windows 8 certainly makes that kind of device better, but it remains unclear if there’s any substantial demand for this style of machine. Little wonder, then, that the PC OEMs have opted for designs that work better as conventional laptops. This is not to mention the even more conventional designs—Ultrabooks equipped with touchscreens—that play it even safer, but which can boast an entirely uncompromised PC experience (and personally, this is the form factor that has me interested).

As such, Microsoft’s challenge is not simply to ensure that people don’t compare Surface Pro to other tablets and dismiss it out of hand. For Surface Pro to succeed, Microsoft needs to make a case that this third category of device—not quite a laptop, not quite a tablet, but a bit of both—not only exists in its own right, but that it’s the best way of fulfilling your computing needs.

That’s a message Microsoft has singularly failed to deliver for a decade now. But without it, Surface Pro is doomed to a series of comparisons in which it fares poorly: too expensive for a tablet, too limited for an Ultrabook, a flawed jack-of-all-trades going up against seasoned masters.

Listing image: http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-GB/surface-with-windows-8-pro/home

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