So I’ve been using the Surface 2 for nearly a month now. Here’s the original review if you missed it. This is what I’ve found in four weeks of use.
Keyboard
This was always going to be interesting. I’ve found I’ve been doing a lot more typing on it than I expected. Example: I discovered I was taking minutes for a meeting so decided to take it along rather than my laptop, purely to give it a workout for the keyboard. I know this wasn’t what I bought it for but I gave it a run. It worked, and at times I was able to touch type almost as quickly as on a normal keyboard; but invariably fingers would stray from the centre of the keys and mistakes would creep in. On a real keyboard when I delete I find it’s my fourth right finger which goes for the backspace key, and it normally gets it bang in the middle, yet on the Touch keyboard I I normally hit the = key. Physically the layout is identical so I don’t know why that is.
One of my original pros of the Touch keyboard was the smooth back when folded around. That’s still true; however when I’m using it as a tablet I find I’m more often than not unclipping the cover completely as no cover at all is sleeker and smoother than a still very thin cover. So if I did that with the Type cover that pro of the Touch cover would be eliminated. Maybe the Touch cover is best as a dust cover that can be used for typing in emergencies, and get the Type cover for the rest of the time.
No way the Touch cover is as quick as the Type cover, as others have noted too, but I never intended it to be. I bought it as a slim cover that could serve as a keyboard where necessary and for that it works pretty well.
I went back to JB Hi-Fi today with my Surface 2 to try the Type cover. I reckon I could live with the extra thickness, it’s not that much more. It is annoying when the cover’s folded back but as noted above unclipping it is so easy.
Design
I love it. It’s really sleek to hold, classy to look at and easy to use. The split screen works really well in meetings, same as noted in the last review but this impression has continued. It’s a bit odd taking photos as the camera is angled out from the back of the tablet somewhat so it’s pointing straight ahead with the kickstand out. Makes orienting it for a snapshot a bit awkward.
OneNote
While this is about the Surface 2, without it I probably wouldn’t have discovered OneNote, and in reality OneNote has probably been the biggest win of this whole Surface 2 acquisition process! I can’t believe how good OneNote is to use, and on the Surface with the data linked to OneDrive it’s a pure Microsoft solution and works REALLY well! I’ve used OneNote for so much stuff in the past three weeks – meeting minutes, informal discussions, moving house plans including scribbling on floor plans and garden layouts. Now if I want to make a note of something, keep some information about something somewhere, it goes into OneNote. I’ve got three notebooks and the pages are steadily growing.
I use text files a lot, preferring this for quick notes and thoughts to a Word doc, and OneNote means I don’t have a series of text files stored in various spots (Dropbox, local device, PC’s hard drive). It’s all there in the one place, and can be formatted easily as required. Definitely a big winner!
OneNote syncs quickly and effortlessly. I was initially worried that as each notebook is stored in its own file, all this syncing back and forth could make for huge data use. A post on Onetastic shows OneNote doesn’t normally sync the whole notebook, just the changes, and really helped me to understand the sync situation.
Bugs
These have persisted. Twice the touch screen became non responsive to gestures so I couldn’t swipe in from the right to get the settings menu. Nor could I swipe down to shut it down when pressing the power button as this also is a gesture! I ended up restarting it from Task Manager in Desktop view. Hopefully this sort of stuff gets addressed in a software update.
From Here…
I’ll keep posting updates as they come to mind. I suspect I may end up getting the Touch 2 cover but time will tell! Certainly I have no plans to send the device back.
