Microsoft Surface Pro Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 5, 2013 9:00 PM ESTBattery Life: The Downside
Despite having an integrated 42 Wh battery (similar in size to the 3rd and 4th gen iPads with Retina Display), battery life is a real sore spot for Surface Pro. Haswell is really designed to drive platform power down to very low levels, which should help close the gap between ARM/Atom based tablets and Core based tablets. Unfortunately, Haswell for tablets won’t hit until the third quarter of this year, which forced Microsoft to use Ivy Bridge.
In our tablet benchmarks, I never saw Surface Pro break the 6 hour mark on a single charge. In most cases I’d expect to see 5 - 6 hours out of Surface Pro in light, tablet usage. Video playback was especially disappointing as Surface Pro managed to use more power here than during our web browsing battery life test. I suspect this might have to do with the relative power efficiency of Ivy Bridge's video decoder. It'll be interesting to see how Haswell does in this department.
I also put Surface Pro through some of our new notebook battery life tests for 2013, and here it didn’t fare too bad. I only have Acer’s 13-inch S7 to compare to but Microsoft managed 3.85 hours in our medium workload compared to sub-3 hours for the larger Ultrabook:
| Windows 8 Notebook Battery Tests | ||
| Battery Test | Acer Aspire S7 (13-inch) | Microsoft Surface Pro |
| AnandTech 2013 Light | 4.00 hours | 5.2 hours |
| AnandTech 2013 Medium | 2.88 hours | 3.85 hours |
This is easily the biggest disappointment with Surface Pro. You just won’t get the all day battery life you do with an ARM based tablet out of this design. I expect Microsoft will have a solution to this problem with Haswell, but not until the end of the year.
Charging
Surface Pro retains the same large, magnetic power connector as Surface RT. In fact, Surface RT’s power adapter will still charge Surface Pro. The Pro model does however come with its own 48W adapter. It’s a nice looking, but large and still fairly traditional two piece power supply (brick + detachable wall cable). There’s no sophisticated cable management other than a tiny hook to help keep the device end of the cable together. One neat feature is the power adapter does feature an integrated USB port for charging your smartphone.
Under max charging load the power supply will draw around 27W at the wall. Microsoft included a 48W unit in order to be able to charge and power the device without slowing down charge time. It took me 2.692 hours to charge Surface Pro from completely empty to 100% with no additional power draw at the wall. The quick charge time is pretty nice and about the only reprieve here when talking about Surface Pro's battery.
I did notice something odd with the first power supply Microsoft sent me. When charging through my power meter, I picked up some interference in the capacitive touch screen itself resulting in around 10% of my taps not being recognized. Microsoft supplied another power supply that seemed to resolve the issue.
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Dekker - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
I don't even like the 16:9 ratio on desktops or laptops because it letterboxes most of the stuff I work on. Particularly, because toolbars, menus and window borders eat up masses of vertical space.On a tablet, 16:9 is pretty hopeless for the same reason. In addition, for app developers it is next to impossible to write an app that is usable in landscape and in portrait mode.
In that sense, this review is a bit disappointing as it focuses mostly on the specs (if only it were a bit cheaper, less heavy and had more battery) and not enough on the usage model and software needed to support the tablet form factor.
I would be interested to know if Anand was able to write an article while on the go or cover a conference using the Pro. My guess is that it can be done, but it would not be an experience worth repeating.
phillyry - Saturday, February 16, 2013 - link
Anand addressed the form factor in his Surface RT review, which he wrote on the RT.Da W - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
Can you replace the SDD?I would take my Kingston Hyper X 256GB from my soon to be former laptop, i would only need to buy the 899$ 64GB version.
Netscorer - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
No, the SSD is soldered and you can not even access it, anyway. Your options are either to buy a 128GB version or rely more extensively on flash storage that you can add via microSD. Of course, flash is very slow, so you won't be able to drive programs off it.netmann - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
How do you know the SSD is soldered?!! Have you look inside the Surface pro? I don't recall Anand mention it in the review. I have not heard of SSD soldered to motherboard!Jaerba - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
He didn't, but the Surface Pro team just did in their reddit AMA."[–]SurfaceTeam[S] 28 points 5 hours ago
Hi, this is Ed on the development team. The internal solid state drive built into Surface is not accessible for upgrade. However, the recessed micro SD memory card slot gives you unlimited memory expandability. The SDXC slot supports the highest performance SDXC memory cards."
Netscorer - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
As Mr. Smith said in Matrix, it was "inevitable". No ultrasmall portable has a luxury of extra space to accommodate for mSATA port and bracket. Same goes for memory.netmann - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
Well, the latest update from Anand's review indicates the storage is in fact a Micron mSATA SSD. I suspected this because the MS Surface has eMMC as storage which has a lot slower performance.I do not think mSATA SSD could be soldered onto the motherboard so most likely it is a separate card that is connected to a slot on the motherboard similar to Apple MBP or Asus Zenbook, therefore it could be upgraded to a larger storage and faster mSATA. The question remains if the mSATA is a standard one or is it a propriety Blade (Gum Stick) one?
Death666Angel - Thursday, February 7, 2013 - link
The Samsung ATIV Pro has an mSata SSD which is user replaceable.thecoldanddarkone - Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - link
I really like this review it recognizes the strength and weaknesses of the platform. I've seen a lot of really bad reviews on the surface pro. Some of the complaints are because the reviewer doesn't know how to use windows 8 (it's a desktop os, it has options, it's not Microsoft's fault you couldn't find different lock options...), others want to complain about the kickstand for 5 paragraphs and others expected it to act like an Ipad. It's not a perfect product, but it's what I would consider as a baseline product. I'm hoping this forces oem's to make better and cheaper products that are like this. That will resolve much of the software situation for windows 8, most of the scaling issues are a result of lazy programmers.