Here’s a review after three weeks of light usage of the Microsoft Surface Book…<\/p>\n
The amazing separating tablet feature turns out not to be a substitute for traveling with an iPad. An iPad is already kind of heavy to hold up and the monster tablet top half of the Surface Book is way too heavy for many of the things that you’d want to do with a tablet. I had dreams of annotating PDF files with handwritten scrawling, but it turns out not to work quite like paper. Resting one’s palm on the screen interferes with recognition of the pen sometimes.<\/p>\n
As soon as you undock the tablet you will probably get an email that needs to be answered. At least with Gmail within the Chrome or Edge browsers, the keyboard doesn’t offer either autocorrect or voice dictation. Thus it is vastly more painful to answer an email than with an Android or iPhone or iPad. (The same software on a Lenovo Yoga 900 actually does offer suggestions for words that you’ve typed but it won’t actually autocorrect as you type along. You need to go back with your finger and highlight all of the words that you want fixed. Again, this is way more cumbersome than answering an email from a smartphone.)<\/p>\n
Most Windows applications don’t seem to know what to do with Tablet Mode. Adobe Reader Touch, for example, doesn’t let you hand-write notes on a PDF file. That can be done only with the Drawboard PDF (included) application.<\/p>\n
Battery life is absurdly short. Using the complete (docked) device at a conference to take notes the machine was dead by noon. All that I had been running was Chrome with Gmail in the background and Microsoft Word for building up a notes file in the foreground. Published reviews of this device indicate a pretty good battery life, but I left all of the defaults and never saw more than about 4 hours of predicted or actual life. Undock and the tablet’s life by itself is even shorter.<\/p>\n
The keyboard has a great feel, maybe the best of all of the devices in the Microsoft Store and much better than anything from Apple (I tried out their keyboards at the store across the mall immediately after using various Windows laptops). Unfortunately it also offers a function key lock feature, which then renders the volume controls non-functional unless you happen to notice a tiny LED on the other side of the keyboard.<\/p>\n
The device wasn’t very smart about switching between “tablet mode” and “regular mode” when you docked and undocked it. That cut down on productivity.<\/p>\n
I took it back to the Microsoft Store in the Burlington Mall and had one of the their experts, who himself owns a Surface Book, check to see if I was doing anything obviously wrong but he couldn’t get any kind of keyboard autocorrection to work either on my Surface Book or his own. He confirmed that the battery settings were proper and said that Surface Books sometimes don’t sleep properly, which explains why the folded-closed device was sometimes warm to the touch. It was easy to have the device wipe its hard drive and easy to get a full refund from Microsoft.<\/p>\n