Review: Microsoft Surface RT

Nobody asked me about my Surface. I tried flashing it all over the place. But despite my best efforts, no one seemed curious.

At Victrola Coffee Roasters in Seattle, I sat in the front window, with a hot pink Touch Cover attached, intentionally conspicuous. Nobody mentioned it. At the airport, I broke it out at the large open-air counter of a crowded bar. I sat in a seat at the gate, facing the walkway, pounding away at its keys on my lap. On a Virgin America flight, crowded with techies, I sat up front and kept it on my tray table the entire time, swiping from app to app. On San Francisco's Muni transit system, I tentatively typed in my seat, afraid it may be snatched on the crowded train. But no one said a word.

The only person to comment on it was a TSA agent at the Seattle airport, who told me I didn't need to take my iPad out of my bag.

That's too bad. Although nobody asked, Microsoft's new tablet is an altogether curious device. It's something completely new and different. It is, in some ways, better than an iPad. In some ways, worse. It's brilliant, and yet it can be puzzling as well. Confoundingly so at times. It's a tablet of both compromises and confusion. It is a true hybrid – neither fully a desktop nor mobile device. That's reflected in all sorts of ways. It is Wi-Fi only, but won't run traditional Windows applications. It has a full-featured keyboard and runs Microsoft Office – but it's certainly meant to be touched and swiped and tapped.

It's different.

brightcove.createExperiences();

Let's at least get this out of the way: This is one of the most exciting pieces of hardware I've ever used. It is extremely well-designed; meticulous even.

The backside kickstand can serve as a metaphor for the entire device. Close it, and it sits flush with the back of the tablet. It's so tightly integrated, if you didn't know it was there, you'd think it was just a seam for the battery compartment. It has three hinges – one of which is just to give it a satisfying sound when opening or closing. (Snap!) It's designed to be like a car door. It's designed to make you use it.

And it's quite sturdy, to boot. In Microsoft's lab, we saw Surfaces that had been opened and closed hundreds of thousands of times. They still snapped open and shut like they were new. We wanted to see how easy it was to break one. It's very possible, but you have to really try. We did manage to break off the kickstand by gradually leaning onto it, but I had to put nearly my full weight onto the tablet before the kickstand snapped off.

People will break the hinge, but I don't think as often or predictably as, say, the glass rear panel of an iPhone 4 or 4S. One other nitpick? The kickstand has a small fingerhold to make it easy to open. But this is on the left-hand side of the device. Most people are right-handed.

And then there is the 3-millimeter-thin Touch Cover keyboard. Ever since Microsoft first unveiled the Surface, this has been a big question mark. Does it really snap on and off so easily? Is it usable? Does it even work? Yes. To everything. It's actually quite fantastic. On this miniature keyboard, that has no actual physical keys, keystrokes fire as fast as you can type them. There is no lag. There is, however, a learning curve.

I struggled mightily with typos and finger placement for the first 24 hours. My left wrist hurt like hell. The pinkie and ring finger on my left hand were cramped. But by day three, my hands began to relax and I was typing quickly and, for the most part, accurately. After a week, I powered along at 90 words per minute. It's not the same speed I hit on a full size keyboard, and I still have typos galore (though far fewer) but given how much I've improved in a week, it's impressive.

Oddly, it is perhaps less effective as a cover than a keyboard. It folds over nicely, but doesn't stay closed as well as I'd like. Several times, I opened my bag to a glow, like something out of Pulp Fiction, to find the Surface had lit up as the Touch Cover came open inside.

The Type Cover ($130, sold separately), which has actual keys, performs even more poorly as a cover, but it's a spectacular keyboard. I could hammer away on it at approximately normal speed from the get-go, and made fewer typos.

One issue I did have with the Type Cover was the accidental pressing of a key. Apparently, at some point I pressed the Shift key for eight seconds, which launched a Filter Keys setting – an accessibility feature meant for users with palsy and other disabilities that may cause them to inadvertently press keys. From that moment on, the keyboard basically did not work. And because Windows 8 and Windows RT are so cloud-connected, this setting propagated itself across all my other Windows devices. It was an easy fix, and Microsoft says a software update that prevents this from happening is on the way. But I thought it spoke to how easy it can be to inadvertently do bad things with the Type Cover.

The 720p HD cameras – front and rear – are junk. There's no other way to put it. The camera has a significant lag time when you're taking shots, and the image quality looks about like the last photo you snapped with your Razr V3. It should be, however, fine for Skype. Just don't expect Nana and Papa to be able to see their little grunions clearly.

One of the compromises Microsoft made with the Surface is its display. It boasts a 1366 x 768 pixel 10.6-inch screen. It looks nice, but in the age of high-density displays, that seems weak. This was a trade-off Microsoft made to achieve all-day battery life. It promises that its ClearType rendering technology and Surface's low-light-refracting screen will make up for the difference. In fact, it claims that there are a mere three units of human perception, out of 116, of difference between this and a Retina Display. Eh. Maybe.

We ran two blind display tests, pitting the Surface RT against a third-generation Retina Display iPad.We ran two blind tests, pitting the Surface RT against a third-generation Retina Display iPad. Both tablets were side by side in a room with ambient light from large windows. We cranked the brightness all the way up and hid the devices behind a sheet of heavy cardboard with two holes of equal size cut into it, so viewers could only see the screens. We then asked members of Wired's staff to come in and judge for themselves, without knowing which device they were viewing.

In our video test, running an HD version of The Avengers, twice as many viewers preferred the Surface to the iPad (six to three). Two others expressed no preference. Most noted that the difference in video quality was negligible.

Text was an entirely different story.

We pulled up a page from The New York Times' website that had multiple typefaces and an image, and allowed testers to zoom in or out and scroll the screens up and down to each person's comfort level. It was a blowout. Every single person expressed a preference for the iPad display. In most cases, a strong one. Multiple people described it as "no contest."

Surface Pricing:$500 32GB with no Touch Cover

$600 32GB with Touch Cover

$700 64GB with Touch Cover

This discrepancy between video and text is reflected in its hardware in another way as well. The Surface's 10.6-inch display has a 16:9 aspect ratio. That's fantastic for watching movies when it's in landscape mode (just like a movie theater!) when the video makes full use of the screen. It's really an enjoyable experience, all the more because of the kickstand, which frees you up from having to hold the tablet while you watch.

But it's also lousy for reading when you hold it in portrait mode (just like a book!) which, to me at least, is the more natural way to hold a device when you're reading. Because it's so long, those 1.5 pounds really start to feel heavy. It gets uncomfortable quickly.

Then there is the build quality itself, which is excellent. Microsoft developed its own magnesium molding process for the "VaporMg" body. It's solid and well built, with nice lines. Sturdy even. Microsoft showed us a drop test by letting a Surface fall from a chest-high height. I duplicated this by literally throwing it at the floor, but to no ill effect.

Finally: battery life. It took me just over 11 hours to run it all the way down in a typical use setting – typing in documents, running apps, watching videos.

This is not a Windows 8 machine. That's the fundamental thing you need to know about it. It's a Windows RT device. That means that none of your traditional x86 programs will run on it. You will only be able to run Windows Store applications.

Which makes it curious that there is a Desktop mode at all (which there is!). What is it there for? There are a handful of system applications and a suite of Office apps. But otherwise, it seems like it's just going to cause confusion. The old Windows desktop is a very odd interface element on this device. I think Microsoft should have cleanly pulled the band-aid off and ditched the desktop metaphor altogether. Leave that for desktop computers.

But in terms of interface elements, Windows RT works much like Windows 8. It is delightfully gesture-friendly, and Microsoft has clearly spent much time thinking about and creating an entirely new interface. Swapping between apps by swiping onto the screen from the left side, using semantic zoom to pinch and zoom out on all your onscreen elements, and the ability to kill running apps by dragging down from the top of the screen are all gestures I miss tremendously when using other devices. I have even found myself absentmindedly trying to use them on other operating systems. And that's great. It means they work.

I used it as my primary computer for several days. There were applications I missed, and I would never want it to be my only computer (the keyboard and screen are just too small) but it worked. I was fine.Likewise, I'm already addicted to the charms – the five options for search, share, start, devices and settings that fire with a right-side swipe, or via dedicated keys on the Touch and Type Covers. The Search Charm, which lets you search both universally and within specific apps, is particularly hot.

But dive past the operating system, and things drop off. In short, there just aren't enough apps. While you'll find apps for just about everything you want to do, there aren't enough options. I missed apps like Dropbox and 1Password and Rdio.

The versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are, well, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I'll admit to not trying anything complex with Excel during my testing period (or ever, for that matter) but they did everything I expected. Unlike apps that run in Metro – excuse me, Modern UI-style apps – you can view several Windows at once on the Desktop. Also, all have application chrome – buttons and menus and other onscreen elements banished by Microsoft's Modern UI style. You can use touch with these apps, but they really demand a keyboard and trackpad to work well.

What's not in the Office suite is Outlook. Microsoft's Mail program has improved tremendously from its early iterations in preview versions. However, it still isn't well-suited to power users. If you deal with lots of e-mail every day, there just isn't enough screen real estate to display messages.

Web browsing works well. I liked having the ability to swap between multiple browser windows by right clicking, but the address bar on the bottom side is something I still haven't gotten used to. It makes sense when you are using the device in touch mode, because that's where your thumbs naturally land, but it's just plain odd with a keyboard.

Yes, you can use it as your only computer. I would never have made that claim about an iPad or Android tablet. But if you only need to live in Microsoft Office and the web and e-mail, and use your computer for media consumption, you'll do great with this. I used it as my primary computer for several days. There were applications I missed, and I would never want it to be my only computer (the keyboard and screen are just too small) but it worked. I was fine.

This is a great device. It is a new thing, in a new space, and likely to confuse many of Microsoft's longtime customers. People will have problems with applications – especially when they encounter them online and are given an option by Internet Explorer to run them, only to discover this won't work. But overall it's quite good; certainly better than any full-size Android tablet on the market. And once the application ecosystem fleshes out, it's a viable alternative to the iPad as well.

WIRED Fast to charge, slow to die. Amazingly fluid gesture-driven interface. Kickstand + Type Cover + Office applications mean it can pull double duty as a functional laptop. Type Cover is the phattest skinny thing since Mike D. OMG, a USB port on a tablet! I'm totally charging up my iPhone with this thing.

TIRED Programs can be slow to load. No 3G or LTE? But I want my internet everywhere! If anything, Touch Cover is too sensitive. You'll find a better selection of apps at your local TGI Friday's.

Updated to correct an error regarding support for Flash.