Well, I was all set to sell my iPad 3 and pre-order a Surface Pro 2 this morning, as the hardware seems really nice, but it seems that Media Center just isnʼt built to support touch:
Well as an update on this topic, I ended up buying a Surface Pro 2 this weekend, thinking it might be the right device for what I needed.
The short version is that I won't be keeping it, but I thought I would return to this topic and give some feedback.
1. UI scaling has been in Media Center for a while now - this was very important, as the standard UI was too small to control via touch.
However, simply scaling things up doesn't really fix the issues with trying to use the Standard View on a touchscreen. It makes things like the playback controls large enough to work well, but gives you a very limited amount of space to actually browse content.
Much of the UI scales correctly, but there is still a lot that does not (e.g. the dividers) which makes control via the touchscreen quite difficult.
2. This is a lot worse than I had expected. Some people had suggested that the standard view was at least
workable with a touchscreen, but I really did not find that to be the case.
Unless you plan on using 100% size with a keyboard and mouse, Standard View is not a good experience on the tablet at all. You can't even scroll the view without dragging the scroll-bars at the side. Trying to scroll a list by flicking as you would in any other application on the device results in you dragging files and re-ordering the list.
3. Theater View via touch is very slow to navigate. There's no quick way to go "home" if you are five levels deep into a view, you have to hit back, wait for the animation, hit back again, wait, and so on.
Scrolling is very slow as well - not the performance, just the actual speed at which the view scrolls.
You can grab the scrollbars at the side again, but this is difficult due to touch inaccuracy.
After figuring out how to disable all the image processing that Intel's drivers were doing, I was very impressed with video playback using madVR on the device.
With a 1080p native screen that size, and the ClearType Display panel, the image with 1080p Blu-ray is
very nice. Absolutely razor sharp - much better than the situation with an iPad where video has to be transcoded and upscaled.
Using DXVA2 scaling and a couple of other tweaks to reduce the GPU load, after about an hour or so of DVD and Blu-ray playback, the tablet was reporting 6 hours of battery life remaining. Not
quite as good as an ARM device, but very impressive considering it's a full-blown PC playing back Blu-rays.
As long as I stuck to DXVA scaling (which should be Lanczos 4 with Intel hardware) and hardware accelerated decoding the device remained cool to the touch, and while there is a fan in there, it was low enough to be inaudible.
Trying to use any of the more demanding scaling options would cause it to quickly heat up and get quite loud though.
I ran into another problem I was not anticipating:
Blu-ray discs contain a lot of data, and on the discs which were approaching 50mbps I would run into issues with the video pausing to buffer every few minutes.
I was only able to get smooth playback of these discs when I was in the same room as the router itself, where the connection would max out at about 75mbps. In the room where I mostly planned on using the device, it would fluctuate between 20-40mbps, which was fine for some discs but not others.
The Retina MacBook Pro here connects to the same network at 270mbps when it's near the router, and about 130mbps in the other room. (I seem to remember my router advertising "600mbps" but I guess that was just marketing and it's really only doing 300mbps)
I have been unable to get 48Hz playback working on the device at all.
The drivers are only reporting 60Hz as a valid refresh rate, and Intel's custom resolution utility says there is "insufficient bandwidth" for 48Hz. (or 24Hz for that matter)
While there is madVR's Smooth Motion frame blending option, I did not spend all this money to watch videos at 60Hz.
More generally, outside of Media Center's use, I was unimpressed with the performance.
General desktop performance felt quite a bit slower than the Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro we have here (a "2.5GHz" dual-core i5) even for things like browsing the web in Firefox. Unfortunately I forgot to run JRmark, and I've now wiped the system. The fans did spin up when playing back stereo SACDs, so it was definitely struggling a bit.
And performance in many areas is worse than you would see on an iPad. Scrolling pages in the browser is choppy - especially in Firefox - and things like screen rotation are not exactly a smooth transition.
Touch accuracy on the device is terrible. Even after running the calibration, I would constantly have to tap things three or four times before they would work correctly.
I had no such problems when I was connecting to my PC via Remote Desktop or VNC with the
Jump Desktop app on my iPad. Apple have always done a much better job with touch than anyone else, whether it's their iOS hardware or the trackpads on their notebooks.
And on the subject of trackpads, the one on the touch cover is a real piece of crap. It's tiny, unresponsive, and there's a lot of friction on the surface of it. Almost entirely worthless.
Even after performing the 100 point calibration, pen accuracy was extremely bad, especially at the edges of the display.
Generally, a lot of things just seemed to stop working for no apparent reason. Rotation would randomly stop working even though I checked that it was unlocked. Sometimes rotating the device a few more times worked, sometimes I would have to reset the device.
A lot of the time pressing the capacitive Windows key on the front would activate (there's a small vibration motor in the device) but do nothing - the Start Menu wouldn't show up.
Similarly, when you swipe in from the sides or the top of the screen, it would only work some of the time. This aspect of Touch worked better
without using any calibration, but then touch in the center of the screen was less accurate than after going through the calibration process.
Volume control in Media Center worked fine to begin with, and then for some reason, System Volume would just suddenly stop working. The slider would move, but the volume would not change. Media Center's Internal Volume worked, but I'd rather control the hardware volume.
The caps lock LED on the touch keyboard would sometimes just flash a couple of times rather than staying lit. Sometimes you would have to press quite a few keys or play about with the trackpad before it would start responding to inputs again.
This actually caused me some
real problems when I first took it out of the box and did the initial setup.
I entered my WiFi password (64 characters) which worked perfectly, entered my username, and created a password for the account. Everything seemed to go fine.
About five minutes after using the device I locked it... and when I went to unlock it, I was unable to login.
The only thing I can think that could have possibly happened is that it either did not register some of my keystrokes, or registered the wrong ones - and managed to do it twice - when I created the initial account.
So five minutes after having the device, I needed to do a complete wipe of the system. After finding out how to do this, it was not a big deal - all I had to do was create a USB recovery key (about 700MB) from my other PC and boot from it, and then it only took about three minutes to wipe the drive, but I couldn't believe what had happened - frankly, I'm still amazed that it did.
I
really think Microsoft should have included a recovery key inside the box too - how much does a 1GB thumb drive cost these days?
It's a minor thing, but I now understand why Apple only let iOS devices turn the screen brightness up when they are in use, and never turn it down.
Far more frequently than I expected, I somehow covered or obscured the light sensor in the Surface which caused the screen to dim while I was using it, and that was very frustrating.
The headphone output is terrible. Lots of hiss, and it only seems to be a headphone jack.
On the MacBook, it's a combined headphone jack, headset port (mic/remote functions) and a 3.5mm optical output. The MacBook port is not the best quality either though - there's still a noticeable hiss from it.
The iPad was much better than either of the two devices in that regard, but it still wasn't silent, and doesn't have an optical output like the MacBook. (which would be really nice)
On a more positive note, I really like having a stand built into the device. Yes, you can get covers for an iPad with a stand built in, but they are nothing like this. It's a good rigid stand and is never going to fold in on itself and fall over, like so many iPad covers with built-in stands.
The two levels of operation in this revision seem like a very important change - I don't think I would have liked it nearly as much if the stand was only fixed to the more upright position. Most of the time I used it in the lower position.
If I
only wanted this as a media playback device to stream Blu-ray quality video around the house (no, transcoded video is not blu-ray quality, even on a 10" display) then I think I would be reasonably happy using this with Theater View if I could sort out the wireless speed. I especially liked the idea of buying the Surface dock so that it could use a wired connection and then I would essentially use it as a small television (it's
about the same size as an old 13" CRT displaying 16:9 content) once it was no longer useful as a computer, but I was expecting that to be a few years from now when I would no longer want to use it as a computer/tablet because better hardware existed.
Right now, that is the
only thing I would want to use it for, and I'm not paying ~$1700 for that. (I bought the 256GB model for the extra 4GB RAM)
I see that the US price for the original Surface Pro has dropped to $600 now on the Microsoft store, which probably means you can get it for even less elsewhere. At $500-600 I would be happy with the device for this purpose. The amount of RAM or internal storage would be far less important if it's only being used as a playback device too.
As a tablet, or a notebook however, there are much better options.
I'm now unconvinced that anyone knows how to do touch properly other than Apple, and if this is Microsoft's flagship product to show off Windows 8's touch capabilities, then it's no surprise to me that it has not been well received.
Aside from the image quality and latency issues inherent to remote connections, I had a much better experience using Windows on my iPad than this.
I was expecting it to be a lot better.
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Topic: Streaming video to tablet devices? (Read 9702 times)