Microsoft Surface Touch cover review.

When the Microsoft surface was finally announced one of its most unique features was the Touch and type covers. The idea of having a keyboard working as a cover is not new, the IPAD has been doing it for quite some time, the unique part of it comes with it’s physical interface. These covers are magnetically connected to the tablet and they don’t use Bluetooth or any type or wireless connection.

The Touch Cover is about 3mm thin, is available in 5 colors and it costs $119. At 3mm the Touch cover wont change the tablets portability in any meaningful way but having a usable keyboard will really make you more productive.

The Touch Cover uses a type of touch sensitivity technology that, to be perfect honest, is kind of amazing. The keys are responsive, soft and not overly sensitive (you can rest of fingers on top of the keys without having to worry about firing it up).  The touch pad on it is a little slow and unresponsive, but taking into consideration how thin, light and portable this thing is that can easily be overlooked. Being that touch cover was designed for the surface and therefore for windows 8, you can find a shortcut for all your charms on the top of it as well as multimedia keys. The touch cover can be bent to almost a 360 degrees, from flat in front of the screen to flat in the back of the tablet, and you don’t have to worry about typing on the keys while holding it up as the keys are automatically disabled when the device is held as a tablet.

The magnetic connection to the Surface is pretty strong, strong enough that you can hold your tablet upside down by the cover and it wont disconnect, not that you should ever do that.

All and all the Touch cover is extremely useful and pretty amazing for what it is, but is not perfect, sometimes the keys don’t register your touch causing some mistyping, and I wish Microsoft would just make them a little cheaper as $119 dollars seems very steep (specially after buying the surface for $499) however it is a far better option than a Bluetooth keyboard.

The touch cover is a usable keyboard, you wont be typing very fast on it but still way faster than using an on-screen one. The $119 price tag is a bit much, being that the surface is being marketed as a productivity device it should have been included with the surface at $499.

Windows 8 RT, My Personal Opinion

The windows 8 RT is the ARM compatible version of Microsoft newest version of windows. If you don’t know what ARM is you can find more information here.

I was really impressed by W8RT when I first started it. It is fast, colorful and extremely touch friendly. There was a bit of a learning curved to get the OS to do what I wanted to, but within a few hours you can become proficient on it.

The share and search charms and the touch screen are great to use and they make using W8 a pleasure. Once you get use to the touch screen interface you will be reaching for the screen of every computer you ever use after that.

The W8RT comes with some free apps a photo, video, music and a people, mail and calendar app, and that’s where the problems start.

When I first got my tablet in early October I was quite impressed by the built quality and looks of it, and even though I was impressed by the W8 RT in general, the OS felt buggy and rushed.

At launch the system was cursed with constant crashes, performance issues and connectivity problems. It was, to say the least, extremely frustrating. Thankfully Microsoft worked quickly, and with the help of the now know as “patch Tuesday” most of those issues were resolved. Most of them but not all of them. Even though Microsoft worked fast and hard to update their apps it is infuriating how much work still has to be done.

Video app:
The surface video app, also know as Xbox video app, is one of the least buggy of the 4 built in apps. The app is extremely slow and clunky. Microsoft insists into signing you in everytime you start the app, and when you finally make your way to your videos sections you will see a list of not only the locally stored files but all the videos you ever bought from the Zune/Xbox video store, slowing the app even further.  In the first few weeks after I got the Tablet this app you crash constantly, most of the times it happened it had to do with changing from landscape to portrait mode while playing a movie, the app didn’t know what the video and then just crash the whole thing. Gladly Microsoft fixed that, now you can only watch videos in landscape.

After a video crash, had to reboot the tablet.

Music app:

Like the video app this app is not bad, is just slow. A few things don’t work for me though. I have the original Zune pass membership, so for $14.99 I get unlimited streaming and 10drm free downloads per month. However, for some reason I can use my credits to buy music even though I’m signed in.

Building a playlist on this app is also surprisingly hard.

People, calendar and mail app:

One of the bigger issues with the surface is the lack of Outlook. Instead, Microsoft gave us the “people, calendar and email app”. I personally don’t need outlook, my surface is mainly for personal use so I don’t need a very robust email app but what we got is just atrocious. I am going to break it down to each app because there is quite a bit to be said about each one of them.

Mail:

The email app that comes on the Surface is pretty straight forward, but very limited. It does support multiple accounts and it will sync your folder with the app. However, you cant create any folders in the app and have it sync with the cloud. Besides that, the app really suffers from a performace stand point. It is really slow. Sometimes you will see a new email message in your live tile, click on it and still have to wait a few seconds until you can see it in your inbox. I am not talking about the full email popping with all the pictures attached or anything, I literally mean that not even the email count have changed yet. quite frustrating.

Calendar:

The calendar app is actually pretty good. It is fast, stable and it does support multiple calendars. You cant, however, create a new calendar from the app, that can only be done only as well.

People:

Now, the people hub was practically unusable when I first got the Surface. The many, many updates pushed by Microsoft since then have made this app tolerable, although it still extremely slow and it crashes quite a bit.

If you are not familiar with the people hub ill explain. The people Hub is a centralized hub for all you social networks (well, definitely not ALL, but the bigger ones). It was first introduced by Microsoft on heir WP7 and it can be quite handy (I haven’t even downloaded a Facebook app for my phone).  Basically any of your friends updates on Facebook or twitter will show up here next to their picture, you can then click on the status to read it or on the contact name so you can see their pictures or recent updates. It works like a charm on my Lumia 920, but not quite as well on the Surface.

The Photo app:

There is a reason why I left this one for last. The Photos app for Microsoft Surface it is so bad that every time I use it I think about just throwing my Surface out of my window.  The app is beautiful, it connects to my Skydrive, Facebook and in theory Flickr and it does support raw (I am not sure it supports all raw files but it support the Nikon D90 .NEF files) but that’s pretty the only good things I can say about this app.

The first thing you will notice about this app is how slow it is, it takes forever to pull a picture up, and even though it is quite stable, meaning that its doesn’t completely crashes much, it never quite works right either.

First of all it doesn’t seem to connect with flickr, I have done all the set up, from beginning to end multiple times, followed every instruction I could find from forums and Microsoft but the app just wont connect to my Flickr acc. It start out, fine it pulls the cover of my albums but when it comes to download the photo I get the “ops, something went wrong” message. I have had my Surface for about 3 months and I am still trying to get that to work (some have said that you need a paid Flicker acc to get it to work but I haven’t tried that yet).

Now the biggest issue I have with this app is the lack of support for the memory card. The W8 RT has a known issue with external memory. Unless you map that drive into the system it will not index any files. It is system wide and mapping the memory card is pretty simple. However, even after you map the drive and get every thing up and running the photos app wont index any files added after the initial set up unless you redo the mapping. It is utterly frustrating to see all your music and videos appear without any issues and  on the other apps but not your photos. I first thought it was a problem with windows 8 but after some research I found the issue isolated to the photos app. It is unacceptable of Microsoft to put out an app with this many issues, just unacceptable.

If I had to describe the Windows 8 RT when it first came out with only one word that word would be unfinished. Now, after a few months it would be Improved.

I love my surface and everyday I love it even more, but some of this issues are to big to ignore.

To conclude, Windows 8 RT has a lot of potential, but Microsoft still has a lot of work to do if they want this to compete with the likes of apple and google.