I love this little beast. It’s versatile, light, and has the hardware to do my everyday work.
I have various means to provision servers in the cloud. So I do not need a high-end Intel I7 chip set with 32 GB of RAM so I can have development environments on my laptop. Besides, Windows Server 2012 R2 Hypervisor is free and I can spin up virtual servers on my home server if need be as well.
– Portability. It’s light and it has a small footprint in a board room meeting.
– Office 2013 Writing Features – There are times where I use pen and paper to write down notes in a meeting if I didn’t get a chance to grab my laptop. So I always state; I will write it down and type it into OneNote later. This percentage of completion is not the greatest. Also, it’s twice the work and its inefficient by writing down the same information twice. Now I can write (with the pen) or type at the very moment it happens. Saves time!
– User Groups/Events. It’s nice to have a portable device at events so I am loaded down with a bulky laptop to take notes nor have a bulky device just to have a PowerPoint presentation.
– OneDrive. 200 GB of space in included This is on top of my 107 GB space I got from February 2014. And I got another 20 GB with my Office365 subscription. A total of 327 GB of OneDrive space.
– Skype Premium. I am a big Skype user. The app for your mobile phone is vital to save minutes on your phone plans. I got my Skype Premium account extended for 12 months that is included on my purchase. Yes please!
– USB 3.0. I purchased a 3 port USB hub with an RJ-45 jack so I can hard wire into a network. So I can run fast backups to my portable hard drives/USB thumb drives.
– PowerShell 3.0 and ISE. PowerShell is my primary command line tool of choice. The PowerShell 3.0 ISE is a must have for all the various work tasks I perform on a daily basis.
– Visual Studio 2013. The little beast can handle Visual Studio 2013. This is the most impressive thing I have thrown at the Surface. I can compile and deploy very quickly to localhost or a remote environment.
– Fiber Keyboard. My hands are too big for this keyboard. I will probably get a wireless keyboard so my gorilla knuckles can type away.
– Windows 8 App screen. The April 2014 Windows 8.1 update will allow me to go back to the Windows 7 screen. Yes, Yes, and Yes!
In conclusion: I never thought a tablet could ever meet my expectation. I know the Samsung tablets are getting powerful and helping to gain market share against the Apple IPad. But being a long time Microsoft supporter, this device integrates everything into one solution.