Microsoft Surface RT with touch keyboard
review by Jamie Coville
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I go to a lot of comic conventions. When I go I usually bring several
things with me. Among them is a netbook, a binder with a schedule, maps
for traveling and to find food, a music player, a want list, a camera, a
way to read digital comics and other things. I'm seeing people at comic
conventions with tablets now and I thought I'd buy one to test out a
convention to see if it could be handy to do all of these things.
I was hesitant about buying a tablet, while they definitely looked neat
and handy I've heard other press people at conventions complain about
them. Last year at San Diego I sat beside another press guy at a panel
and saw his new iPad. I told him I wished I had one of those.
He looked at my netbook and said he wished he had it instead. In short,
tablets are not yet very good for doing written work on. I normally
record my panels and do my written work after the convention so I wasn't
super worried about the writing part, but it did factor into my decision
making in which tablet to try. The tablet I chose was the Microsoft Surface RT 64GB. I chose it because it came with a student version of MS Office (my want list is in Excel format), it attaches to a light, decent sized keyboard that can flip around the back, has a built in music app, a full sized USB port, and it has a 10inch screen size and has a good 8 hour battery life. The 32GB version is cheaper, but as the Surface RT has a restricted version of Windows 8 that takes up a lot of space, I went with the model that would give me more space. I took it with me to the HobbyStar Toronto ComiCON, a 2 day show as place to test it. Prior to the show I had to do a lot of work with it to get it set up the way I wanted it. The built in music player is made for Xbox and it does not play m3u playlists. It also does not play music based on folders, it instead grabs all the mp3 tags and sorts them for you based on artist or album (and got forbid if your music isn't perfectly tagged). I found the player to be useless if you have a folder of say 80's 1 hit wonders and you want to play them. You would have to use the program to sort though your long, every song mixed together list of music and pick out the songs and create new playlists, which was not handy or easy to do. I did try downloading another music app, but did not find one that played m3us or music by folders. Eventually I discovered the Xbox music player will play windows media playlists, so I managed to find a really crappy program that would create playlists by folders and spent a couple of hours re-creating my playlists and transporting them over via USB stick. I was able to import them via the Xbox music app, but they went on weird (listing them a C:\Temp\etc.. ) even though they were in the music directory. They also went in the opposite way alphabetically, starting with ZZTop and ending with Abba. While it wasn't perfect, my music was on the tablet and they did play. I did listen to music via my tablet plugged into my car aux port on my drive to Toronto. What I didn't like was how when I stopped and shut my tablet off, then started it up again, the tablet did not remember where I had left off on my playlist. My current MP3 player does that but Xbox music does not. I also found it was difficult to quickly make any edits to the play lists I had created. I decided to give up on using the tablet for music. My old, but reliable MP3 player was still better for my needs. I had no problem moving over my want lists via Excel or anything written in Word (a schedule, etc..). While on the convention floor going through long boxes I didn't have too much of a problem viewing my want list. It was nice to only have to touch the screen to scroll instead of having to flip pages back and forth in a binder. This was the better part of my experience but there was some problems. Sometimes the Surface didn't rotate as the screen moved as it's supposed to, and occasionally my list would come up blank creating "oh shit did it delete it?" moments. So I would occasionally have to monkey around with it to get the want list to show. Also there was no quick way to mark something as "Got it." With my paper list in a binder I could just use a pen to mark of the issue # that I had just purchased. Even prior going to the con I had tested the camera on the tablet. I knew right away it was not a good replacement for my old digital camera. So I didn't bother testing that at the convention. I also didn't find a quick way to put in a schedule, other than pulling up the conventions PDF file. A comic convention scheduling app with an alarm and built in map to the room is something I've been waiting for and would be a boon to con goers like myself. I did not need a GPS for driving to Toronto as I'm familiar with the trip, but as the tablet only does wifi and has no cell tower connection I did not bother trying to get a GPS to work. When I did have wifi at the place I was staying I was able to pull up some restaurants and save them for later. With the Surface I got the touchpad which is different as you don't press the keys in, you only need to touch them for the letters to appear on the screen. The tablet does make a type noise though when a key is entered to let you know it's been "pressed". I was starting to get the hang of it after a couple of days. It wasn't perfect as it's easy to make spelling mistakes, but then so was my netbook. The tablet does have a built in kickstand, which is best used on flat surfaces. It's not something you want to do on your lap while waiting for a panel to start (which is where the netbook is better). It was good enough for what I wanted to do, make notes on the day's events to be polished up later. I had also downloaded the best reviewed app for reading cbz/r files so I could read some comics. It was good, but I found for some reason it didn't read some of my files. I did not investigate it further, I do know the files read just fine on my desktop. I blame this more on the software then the tablet, but I did have problems with the tablet not rotating the screen with this program as well. One surprising problem with the Surface was it's inability to connect to Pop3 e-mail servers. It had the online version of Microsoft Outlook and had said that through Outlook (or gmail) you could make that program hook up through your pop3 e-mail and then view it through that. This method did not work for me using Outlook and I suspect Microsoft themselves know their own program doesn't work as they recommended people use gmail for that service. When researching this I had found recommendations that I should try and convince my ISP to use another technology for e-mail as Pop3 is old. Good luck on convincing the mass market to do that. I had spent about $800 Canadian on this tablet and found it was not worth it. For that amount of money I expect the tablet to have some long established software features built to suit me, instead of trying to force me to use Microsoft's inferior methods and products. I came away with the feeling that Microsoft just dumped this tablet out on the market before Apple's iPad completely ran away with it. Maybe if you are already using Xbox for music and the online version of Outlook for all your e-mail it could be better for you. I do need to replace my netbook so I'll be trying a different tablet at my next convention, but I can't recommend the Surface RT.
Regards, http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com News and discussion on a free, Delphi like forum.
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E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net
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