Gabe, one of the two guys behind Penny Arcade, has reviewed the Surface Pro – as an artist. He’s in love with it. “Sketching with the Stylus in Sketchbook was awesome. It’s important to note that you CAN lay your hand on the screen while you draw without messing up your work. There was no brush lag at all and the pressure sensitivity worked perfectly. The stylus itself felt exactly like drawing on my Cintiq except that the Surface screen is smooth whereas the Cintiq screen has a bit of texture to it.” I’m no artist, so I got a Surface RT, but I’m loving it too. The tablet/laptop combination just works. My ZenBook and Nexus 7 have been off and in storage since the day I got the RT.
I’ve got one of the Samsung Windows 8 touch devices, and using the stylus for arty stuff is just magic. Also, the hand writing recognition is astounding: it can read my handwriting and even I can’t do that at times.
Edited 2013-02-27 01:37 UTC
Surface with Windows RT does look nice. I wouldn’t touch the Pro though.
I just wish the RT included an active digitizer for Pen :/
So the artists use Windows these days, like the old Mac OS segment? … and Android fills the old Windows segment with its big marketshare (plus OEM bloatware, malware and uninspiring low/mid range devices). Does that make Apple/iOS the modern day Linux distro?
WTF!! O_O
Edited 2013-02-27 03:23 UTC
Linux distros remain hacker-friendly OSs more than anything else, so a mobile equivalent would probably be Cyanogenmod, with the extra confusion that brings about what Android exactly is. Perhaps Ubuntu could succeed there also, but I’m not sure if that’s what Canonical have in mind.
It seems to me that Apple products nowadays are rather designed for those who want things to Just Works, even it it means losing control and features. So something more like vTech computers for grown-ups ? http://www.bestbuy.ca/multimedia/Products/500×500/102/10212/1021268…
Edited 2013-02-27 11:34 UTC
No, it makes Apple/iOS the modern day Apple/Mac.
The more things change the more things stay the same.
Boy I could sure use a Nexus 7 or a Zenbook and my B-day is Sunday, What perfect timing!
Exactly my thoughts! What a shame to not use the Nexus 7. Unfortunately my birthday is not next Sunday, but I would take it anyway
Edited 2013-02-27 06:07 UTC
IMHO Microsoft would do well to add stylus – support to Surface RT — the battery life on the Pro is just abysmal and how it gets hot is not terribly comfortable, either, whereas the RT gets quite a decent amount of utility from its battery.
Not that I would buy either of them myself, I’m waiting for the 2nd generation of Galaxy Note 10.1 to see how it and the Surface Pro stack against each other.
… full of money up to his house.
Too bad they already beat you to that joke… 12 years ago.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/10/23/
Well the Simpsons is where this comes from.
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/South_of_the_Border
what was that? 20 years ago?
But to get back to the point, one positive review in sea of negative reviews seems strange.
I wonder if he’s tried the Galaxy Note 10.1, i own the device and it has all of the art stuff apart from the games, being android. I know the pen supports 1024 points of pressure, in the review he mentions the iPad and the eraser point and i agree it’s really useless apart from broad strokes. The Galaxy Note’s pen is in a different league, you do get Photoshop Touch which is good but obviously not as good as full Photoshop it’s more on par with photoshop elements.
It’s a good review and certainly makes me thing of the
surface for future tablets as being able to run standard windows apps is a big plus.
on a side jokey note, shame the Surface hasn’t got a VGA/DVI connector as he could connect up his Cinq24HD onto the surface and have multiple drawing surfaces
Other questions aside he did use Photoshop for parts of the work done, so the software stack isn’t quite there on Android.
Just curious on this… the Surface Pro has a mini DisplayPort. Do you simply need video output for what you describe? If so – this is actually possible, and I would be interested to hear if there’s any appreciable latency difference between the two input methods.
I’d really appreciate a review and comparision of drawing latency… all the devices I’ve nearly bought .. I didn’t because the latency between the action of drawing/writing and the display is way too much.
Surely with gigahertz processors….. even the main pointer keeps up better….
You know, if they could get the battery life closer to the 6-8 hour range, increase the storage dramatically, and the cooling on par with ARM tablets I might be interested. As it is it’s an interesting concept of what might one day be a good product
A tablet with ARM battery life and ARM heat output would be an ARM tablet.
So it wouldn’t run x86 code and it wouldn’t be fast.
When picking from a menu of features, “everything” is not a valid option.
More suitable processors are in the pipeline from Intel. S0ix sleep states, where the CPU goes into a deep sleep the moment you stop touching the screen, is coming in Haswell and will likely extend battery life hugely in the surfing-on-the-sofa scenario. If you do play Civilization on a Haswell Surface you’ll still burn through the battery in no time, but the lighter use cases will be greatly improved.
Give me Metro Chrome and I’d happily get an RT. It’s the silly things that keep me away – like being able to install a lastpass plugin
Though http://surfacegeeks.net/lastpass-mobile-integration-surface-metro.h… seems to have sorted that. To some extent anyway
Chrome does have a Metro app.
but not for windows RT – which is where Frood was wanting it.