I can give you all the specs but you can get those here what I am about to write is simply my week long experience with the new Surface 2.
I am using the type cover 2 with backlit keys, excellent idea and fairly comfortable to use and good accuracy. Three lighting settings - nice, protects the tablet as well. I was debating if I should drop the 129. + 13% HST on it and in the end I did it, mainly to protect the screen then of course typing on a keyboard is far better then the screen keyboard.
Speaking of the screen keyboard, it is very good and has many ways to display itself. I used it alone for 1 week and was not turned off in anyway.
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I use a Bluetooth mouse that is ancient in the tech world and it works great, the track pad on the keyboard is horrible and useless by my expectations and standards.
Xbox music rocks, videos play extremely well and now in 1080p HD which is lovely. I really enjoy the close up experience visually paired with stunning audio its so much fun.
I have the 32 GB and after all the required updates I am left with ~ 16 GB I create a recovery USB drive and promptly remove the Restore partition to free up ~ 4 GB.
*** be forewarned that if you lose your USB Recovery Drive you are out of luck in regards of Refreshing / Restoring your Surface if you delete this partition. It is difficult and convoluted though not impossible to restore this partition, the average user will be hard pressed to do so. I know that it is possible because I have done this successfully. ***
I have a 64 GB class 10 microsd card and have moved all my media to direct there instead of the OS drive. This leaves me with more room to install apps at my leisure. You can also free up drive space by performing disk clean up and removing any apps you are not going to use. This Surface 2 configuration is not for hoarders.
Apps run in the background nicely - I am using Xbox music collections listening to Mozart whilst performing this task with no lag - nice for more capabilities I highly recommend viewing this excellent video ..
OK onward ... PRINTING and FILE SHARING -
I use Google cloud printing and as far a file sharing I was interested in file sharing to my iPad Air.
I have a classic printer that is UPD PCL6 that is not supported by Windows 8.1 RT so using Google cloud was a no brainer - the app to attach costs 1.99 and well worth it - would be better if it was free of course.
I use a file sharing app on my iPad Air that essentially turns on a lite FTP server and I attach my Windows 8.1 RT using ftp:// call and it works darned well. It is a bit of drain on the CPU resources but it does work.
Homegroup sharing works well and you can also attach to Mac OS effortlessly as well.
One more interesting app is a Torrent client that works pretty well, it is slower then a conventional desktop or laptop but hey ! there is at least that ;)
So in the end I have decided to keep the device and its very expensive keyboard, and enjoy it very much. It's speedy, clever and sexy. I recommend picking one up and spending a good amount of time on it before you decide to return it. You may find that despite certain limitations - meaning how you currently work, you may find that there are alternatives and answers to your glass walls... you will hit one guaranteed, but like me you will find an answer.
Who says ' think different' ? not sure, who, is supposed to be thinking different ( definitely NOT the end user ) with Microsoft, you WILL think different.
Overall I give it an A.
I edited this blog using the Surface 2 entirely. hmmmmm ..... ;)
