 Welcome to my much-awaited, I hope, unboxing and first look at the Surface from Microsoft. This is a 10.6-inch tablet and recommends, represents Microsoft's first foray into their own branded hardware. So I actually went to the Microsoft store and bought this today. If you follow me on Twitter, then you already know that. There was a bit of a lineup, but I had like a reservation thing. I got the kit that comes with the touch cover and the Windows RT tablet. I got a 32-gig Surface. Remember, a 32-gig Surface has a Windows operating system installed on it, so even though it's 32 gigs, you don't actually get really that close to 32 gigs of actual storage on your Surface tablet because the Windows OS is a little bit bigger than we're used to seeing from something like an Android or an Apple mobile operating system. So inside I have the Surface box itself here, and then I've also got a separate box that has the touch cover. So touch cover is one of the biggest innovations that Microsoft has really brought about with Surface in that it's a nice little kind of suede-y cover that's actually quite nice. Wow, it feels really dense, like it's a material that's not just going to kind of crap out after a little while. And then the keyboard itself, which is a touch-sensitive keyboard, so they've... Here, funny, funny, okay, iPhone size comparison. So the cover itself is not much thicker than something like Apple's Smart Cover. It feels very durable, it's quite rigid, and then they've actually built a keyboard into it. So the keyboard is touch-sensitive, which means that you type by touching the space bar or touching the keys, and it's pressure-sensitive, but there's actually no tactile feedback. Now there's a separate type cover available that does have a low-profile keyboard. I'll look at that one later as a separate unboxing, but for now we're going to focus on the touch cover. It has, again, kind of a velvety, suede-y feel to it, so it won't scratch up your screen as long as you don't have any sort of rocks or debris or anything caught in it, which shouldn't be that much of an issue. The Surface uses a proprietary six-pin connector for data and power for the touch cover itself, and it uses magnets to attach to the Surface. It actually has a touchpad as well, and then it looks like left and right mouse click buttons, so that's kind of cool. I haven't seen one in person yet, so I'm very excited about this. We've got proprietary keys up here, and you'll notice there's no F1 to F12 keys. However, you can use the function key to enable those buttons, so if you wanted to press Alt F4, then you'd go Alt, Function, and then F1, 2, 3, 4 in order to press that. Okay, so included pieces. Relatively okay-looking power brick. It's around the size of the Apple one and then uses a magnetic connector here to charge the Surface tablet itself. Very slick-looking. There you go. Cameraman can have a look at that if he sees fit. There you go. The prongs just fold up like that. Just a Windows RT sticker. You could even take that off, and it'd be completely clean and just black all along, except for the safety notifications and whatnots. Inside here, once we take out the Surface, don't worry, we'll look at that soon, we've got Microsoft's included little brochure. Going around in Windows RT, so you swipe from the right to open up the Charms menu. If you... This is French. If you're using the trackpad, move your pointer into any corner to access Charms. Get around Surface, so they've got everything labeled there. Hardware setup, software setup. Okay, so this is a very, very basic guide. There's really not a whole lot there. Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT. So, something to note about Windows RT is that... Oh, look at this, environmentally friendly packaging. You're using just kind of a paper, like a... You can tell that it's like a recycled paper because it's... Well, I'm assuming it's a recycled paper because it's made of sort of bits and pieces of other kinds of paper. You know what? Let's not make any assumptions. Let's just say that it's made of paper and is therefore recyclable, if nothing else. And I can't get that to go back together. So, Surface. Plastic. Here we go. I'm very excited about this hinge. The kickstand, as they call it. Oh, okay. It's not light, actually. It's not light, but Microsoft spent a lot of time optimizing the weight distribution inside the Surface to make it so that, however you're holding it, it should be comfortable and it should feel similar, regardless of which side you're holding it from. So the idea is that, even though the weight is a little bit on the heavier side for a tablet, it's not like a Galaxy Tab 10.1 or even the ASUS Vivo Tab, which is very light, also a Windows RT device, it feels okay to hold. I also like the squared corners. These are 22-degree angled edges all around the entire outside of the tablet. Rounded corners are nice in theory, however you can slip off them. And this has a bit of a catch to it. So you can see it's not quite just rounded and smooth, but you can actually hold on to it okay. So I like that so far. The kickstand itself, I'm not sure how to operate it yet, but there you go. So you pull it out there. Makes that noise, I guess. They apparently spent a lot of time on the noise of the kickstand. And when you close it, they're comparing it to a luxury car door closing. I'm not quite sure I'd make that comparison, but I do like the way it slows down before it hits it so that it doesn't close too hard. Very nice. So the reason for the 22-degree edges here is so that it'll actually sit flush when you have the kickstand out and when you're using it. It's nice to have this integrated as opposed to being part of the smart cover. If you guys have a smart cover or a similar type cover for your iPad, I have a smart cover clone. And what I don't like about it is that it has over time become far less rigid, so it's much harder to prop the device up on the smart cover. Whereas something like a kickstand, I don't think has the potential to ever really become rigid. You can see that...actually you can hear, you can see the design that goes into these hinges. It's got one, two, three hinges here that all look very, very robust. I'm just going to angle this towards the light a little bit more so you can see in there. Okay. All right. There's the connector down here. Okay, yeah. So let's do the physical tour. There's your charging spot. USB port. That is a USB port, like U with an S and a B. And you can plug in pretty much whatever you want as long as there's driver support. So things like printers are going to be quite limited at the beginning. However, any kind of input devices, keyboards, mice, webcams potentially, again, it'll come down to support, should work in this USB port. Right there we've got what appears to be micro HDMI out. Speaker here and a speaker here. Yes, stereo speakers. Take that, Apple. And not positioned such that they'll be covered when you're operating the tablet. The tablet is clearly meant to be used in a horizontal landscape orientation. So there's your light sensor. There's your webcam. There's something. I don't know what that is. And then the Windows button is right here. So if you use it like this, it'll be kind of weird if you're using like a Skype video chat or anything like that. Power button's here. And I am afraid I don't actually quite know what these are. So we'll have to, haha. Oh, it doesn't even say. Look at that. It doesn't actually point at the speakers on this thing. So there you go. I'm gonna assume there are more. Check this out though. So the rear facing camera is actually oriented a little bit strangely, if you can't see then sorry, but it's also oriented 22 degrees off. So what that means is if you pull the kickstand out and place the surface down on something, that camera will be looking out level now. Which means that if you're walking around sort of, you know, doot-doot-doot-doot, using it as a camera, in order to take a picture straight ahead of you, you wouldn't hold it out like this. Instead, you'd hold it more like this. So you're looking down at it so that it'll take a level picture. Okay, moving right along. We've got another headphone jack, volume rocker, and really nothing extraordinary in terms of I.O. other than that USB port. So the setup process doesn't take that long, but I don't know if I'll bring you guys along for the whole thing. Of course, we're reading the EULA very carefully. Microsoft spent a lot of time on the screen as well. So even though the screen is only 1366 by 768, it is using a bit of a special technology that allows the panel itself to be much closer to your eyes than... Okay, so there's a few layers. There's your glass layer, there's your touchscreen interface layer, there's your actual LCD panel layer, and what they're trying to do is they're trying to minimize the air gaps in between, get them as close as possible, because what that does is it reduces reflectivity. So while the surface is reflective, it'll be more difficult to make out the details of the cameraman based on what I'm seeing already in it than it would be with something that had a bigger air gap. That's where that innovation comes from. So give me a sec, guys. I'm just going to get the wireless setup and we'll be back. I missed a small detail before, actually a pretty major detail. The micro SDXC port is here under the kickstand. So not around the edge. It's something you'll never see once you put it in there. It'll be completely covered just like that. I wonder if you can pry the kickstand up without... Oh, yeah, you can. That's not actually too difficult. So I want to show you guys how the touch cover attaches. So cameraman actually did this when we were off camera. Oh, okay. Wow. Okay, so it actually aligns itself pretty easily. Even though, see, you can see the orientation is not even close. And it just kind of kajiggers itself correctly without any difficulty. Now you've seen people doing this on the internet, but I'm actually going to do it live here for you guys just to show that it's not going anywhere. Now cameraman's take on this form factor, and we're going to do the iPhone comparison again. That's how thick it is. With the touch cover is that it's bulky. To which I would reply, okay, yes, it is bulky compared to your iPad 2 or your iPad 3 because it is a slimmer device. And this does way more. The touch cover, what I didn't realize about it is I was kind of going, yeah, it's really thin, it's really thin. It does way more than most tablet covers will. But if you compare this not to a tablet but to a notebook, because remember this device is actually capable of being a productivity tool, unlike most notebooks which aren't even close to that because of the fact that it does have a notebook-able, notebook-ready resolution of 1366 by 768. You can attach a full keyboard to it. And it does have Microsoft Office, that to me makes a very big difference. Now this is my very first time with the touch cover. I'm going to fire up Word, and there's been a lot of talk about how does the touch cover compare to typing on a real keyboard. So let's go with, hell, no, that's not what I meant to say. Hello world, this is me. I missed one. This is my first attempt on the touch cover. I think I'm, okay, I missed an M. Doing pretty well. So is it perfect? No, but there are bumps here. Well, they're not bumps, they're actually gaps in the letters that will give you some idea. If you just kind of go like this, it's not going to detect any button presses because it's pressure sensitive. So the pressure, whoops, that was just a typo, sensitive touch cover may take some getting used to. Very responsive though. So there's no delay, there's no lag, there's no weirdness that's been associated with some Bluetooth keyboards in the past. The touch pad's not bad. I wish it was a little bit bigger, but there's only so much you can do. Accuracy, when you're moving really, really slowly, I'd say is not as good as I'd like. You can see it kind of drifting a little bit there. And I don't know what they can do about that because of sort of the fuzzy felt kind of material that they're using, I don't know how you maintain that kind of accuracy without a more smooth surface to use. So Metro UI, start button will do that, in theory. Will it? What are we doing here? Start button, there we go. What does that one do? Okay, well that one does it. The modern UI. So what apps can you use on this thing? You will have to shop in the Microsoft store because this is an ARM architecture device. This is using a Tegra 3 processor, which is a quad core processor, but not like the fastest mobile processor in the world by any stretch these days. What that means is there's no backwards compatibility with your normal Windows devices. Surface Pro is coming, and Surface Pro will be an x86 device, which means you can install anything you want. In this one, the desktop is, whoops, that's weather, the desktop is available, but it's almost, the only things you can really do are things like accessing your classic task manager, your resource monitor, your office suite, which they haven't really changed the interface much compared to what we've seen on desktop versions. You can use the file explorer, and you can actually use that with the USB port. You have access to where Windows is actually installed, so you can see there's 17 gigs free out of our 32 gigs total. So you can, you know, users, and you can browse, and you can move files around just the way you would on a real computer, but you can't go and install like CPU-Z to tell you about the processor in here. It just doesn't work that way. So the Pro will be x86. So you're going to be doing mostly everything from this UI here, and the animations are very, very smooth. Microsoft's worked very hard on making sure that they don't have some of those early Android sort of awkwardness things going on where the animations start to look very jerky if you do certain things. So the Store, everything will be through the Store. An app written for the modern UI, or the Metro UI, whatever you want to call it, should be compatible with Windows 8 and with Windows RT, even though they're really not the same thing just with a recompile. It's just older apps where you're going to run into that difficulty, and it'll take time for things to get updated. I mean, you've got your Netflix, New York Times. It'll take, again, it'll take time, but it's Microsoft. They'll find a way to get the right things released. People are complaining, especially reviewers, about the lack of a Facebook or a Twitter app, especially from the start. There's a Newegg app. Come on, guys. I've got to go getting in my video here. And I think that pretty much covers it for now. Now it's possible cameraman and I screwed something up because while it was setting up, we were playing around with the keyboard. But now that we've done a quick reboot, everything is working correctly. So the Windows button now works. Swiping in from the right, aha, Charms menu. So that is where you'll access your search, although it's totally unnecessary to do that because you can just type control panel and you don't even have to open up the search in order to search for something, which I think is fantastic. Sharing is going to be, well, for sharing things. Nothing can be shared from the desktop. It's contextual. Let's go back to the Metro. Modern UI, modern UI. Settings. So these are really smart, the way they've got this implemented. I love the way that they've done volume and power where it actually just readjusts where it is to where you left it off and then you can go up or down from there. Same thing with screen brightness. So you can always access settings like screen brightness without digging through your menus. If you're someone like me who's constantly tinkering with screen brightness, you're going to appreciate stuff like this as you move from darker rooms to brighter rooms or whatever else the case may be. Swiping from the bottom and from the top are things that are going to be specific to given applications. So here we're in Internet Explorer 10. You can change a lot of settings in IE 10 through the modern UI. Actually, you can't really change any settings in IE 10 through the modern UI. See? There's a few Internet options here, but most of them are going to be changed. Anything more advanced? From the desktop Internet Explorer. And you can use this one if you prefer. Remember, this is Internet Explorer 10. Fully flash enabled, unlike other mobile platforms now. So that's something that may matter to certain people like me, for example. So let's go back to our modern UI. So let's go ahead and open a couple things in...open a new tab, hold it down, open a new...whoops, copy link. Nope. I pressed the wrong thing. Open link in new tab. So we've got a few tabs. This is how it's handling tab browsing. You scroll down from the top and then you navigate to whichever one that you want. You've got a nice little preview there. You can also add tabs this way and then just key in manually what you want. So for example, ponies, we could look at pictures of ponies on the Internet very quickly on the surface from Microsoft. Swiping in from the left hand side gives you access to a multitasking sort of menu here. Since we've only got one...oh yeah, right, screen sharing. So there's true multitasking on Windows RT. You could have like Skype running here with a video preview. You could have a messenger application. You can have anything you want actually running from either side. Actually I don't know...I don't remember how you do it this way. No, that's not right. Wow. How do you do that? Ah, here. Okay, so here's task switching. Give me a sec. I'll figure out how that works. Give me one moment. So let's fire up the Maps app and it'll just use GPS to zone in on wherever we happen to be. I've seen a lot of complaints about application loading time. For me, I'm still using an iPhone 4 so it doesn't bother me that much but that's where we are. If you want to search for something nearby then you can just kind of go McDonald's and in theory, really? No results were found for my search. I've never used Bing Maps before so it's possible that I'm doing it wrong somehow. But let's go with NCIX and see if it manages to find...ah yes, so NCIX is more important to Microsoft than McDonald's apparently which is awesome. So it shows us a bunch of different ones. You can browse between them like this. I promised to show you guys how the multitasking or task switching works. So what you do is you drag in from the left and then back out and you can easily switch between any of the apps that you have open. It's extremely fast and feels very smooth. You can go all the way up to the desktop where we have a Word document that we're working on and then you can also bring any of those applications out to the forefront like this and then you can also pin them to the side just like that. So that's how that whole thing works. So we're playing back Big Buck Bunny in 1080p and the realization...oh we figured out how to put tasks over here as well...is that it is a little bit on the chop...well it's not a little bit choppy. It's not quite able to do that yet. This is using the...is this using the modern browser? Yeah, modern browser versus the desktop version browser. However it's watchable. It's certainly watchable. I do want to show you guys how to do this though. So if you wanted to move...let's say...okay so there I think you guys get the point. So we've got our Photos app open and if we wanted our Photos app on the right hand side, we open that first then we take Maps and we don't do that. We go to our Photos app. Sorry, I'm still getting used to it. This is literally my first time sitting down with this. Then we take Maps and we bring it out here. Then we go like this. Now we can see our wonderful photos which we haven't added any of here while we use the Maps app in the foreground and you can switch them back and forth like that or even swipe the whole thing away. If you want to close an app, you just take it and drag it all the way down to the bottom and it will be closed so it's not using up any resources. Remember you do have 2 gigs of RAM so unless you're running heavy duty applications, you shouldn't run up against that too often because you'll be CPU limited in more cases than not compared to being RAM limited. So I think that pretty much wraps it up for my Windows RT and Microsoft Surface first impressions. It's not that warm. It's a touch warm here but it's very localized. The edges are still quite cool which is nice because that means when you're holding it like this, you're not going to get that sweaty palms thing going on that you do with some mobile devices. The iPad 3 in particular I have a hard time dealing with whereas the iPad 2 I find is just spectacular. So what's the point of all this? To me this isn't a tablet so much as it is a laptop replacement and it's not quite a laptop replacement because you can't do the same kind of serious work on this that you can on a laptop. So we're at kind of this point of either convergence or divergence depending on how you want to look at it where these kinds of devices where you can use the touch screen to interact here, you can use the mouse and the keyboard to interact here are not going away. This is here to stay and I really like the usage model. I'm just not quite sure where it fits in with this whole RT arm powered thing and I'm really excited to check out Surface Pro which is coming soon. Thank you for checking out this unboxing and first look on Linus Tech Tips and don't forget to subscribe. A cameraman sort of put it his way and he's more of an apple guy but his comment is this is for people who don't want the lockdown restriction of the iPad, they want more productivity than that but aren't necessarily typing 5000 word essays on a regular basis so this is good enough. Also I realized I never did show the camera app. The camera app is pretty straightforward so you got your 720p camera on the front, you can switch cameras like that and like I said see it's looking straight ahead in spite of the fact that the kickstand is out. Motion is pretty smooth. Camera options are pretty limited so you can adjust your resolution or you can adjust your audio device that's about it and then you can switch from video mode to cam, oh that's fast, video mode or not video mode. So let's go ahead and point it, so this is how I use it to point it straight ahead see which is actually kind of nice as long as you're filming at this level but if you were like trying to see over a crowd at a concert or something with your tablet and take a video I mean people who take video on their tablets in public though, no offense but yeah I mean if you were trying to do that then it would be kind of awkward but here let's go ahead and we'll look at this plant. Not super, it's not a super highlight sort of scenario here but we can go ahead and you just touch the screen in order to take a picture and what I meant to do was take a video and capture video of this, frame rate is not particularly high but there's the plant and there's the bottom of the plant and we can stop it just like that. There's not really a delay though that's kind of nice so let's see how fast the shutter is here. Let's take a picture of some cars. That's nice. So then we go ahead and go back to the main thing and then we can open our whoopsie daisies that's not what I was looking for. I need that, sorry like I said still getting used to it guys and then I'm looking for the photos app which I have now lost. Well there it is right in the middle, right in the middle of like everything. Pictures library now has all the pictures I took. There you go, camera roll. Just like that. There's the video. Okay let's see if PlayLax like on that. There you go. Okay we're done for real this time. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips and my luxury car audio, luxury car audio. I'm still sick. I'm still a little like you know not quite you know car door tablet that I got going around in here.