I am testing out the 64GB Surface Pro with the keyboard and the wedge mouse.  It seems to run well with good responsiveness.  I loaded Office 2013 and it works as expected.  The tiled interface is a little weird to get used to, but it works well on a touch screen.  Miscellaneous software was loaded via a USB cd drive and worked well.  We loaded up an elevator control application for one of our maintenance crews and they were able to use it in the field with a USB to Serial convertor.  I have streamed Pandora and outputted it to a large P.A. system and it sounded fine.  I watched some Netflix and it works good.  We are running a Juniper VPN and the Junos Pulse client does the job.  With the wedge mouse, RDP works like a dream as long as you set the native resolution lower.  Since the screen is a 10” widescreen, the desktop on the other end is really small when it emulates the 1680 x 1050 (or 1080) on the tablet screen.  If you notch it down to 1440 x 900, it is great and the mouse gives it a huge advantage over doing RDP work on an iPad.

 

The biggest con I have found so far is that the wireless doesn’t auto-connect reliably when returning from sleep.  It connects every time on a fresh boot, but when waking it up, I have to manually re-connect.  I have read on the internets that this is fixed in the 8.1 release though.  Battery life is better than a typical laptop, but not as good as the iPad.

 

My sales pitch to a user would be:

 

If this is a laptop replacement, it will do almost everything that you can currently do and probably a little better.  It supports Java and Flash etc., can run most typical Windows software, has a USB port, and boots up quick.  Storage space is limited compared to a full laptop though, and the screen is small compared to the laptop is probably replacing.  Case options a bit limited due to the built in kickstand, but the skin I found looks and works good.

 

If this is a comparison to the iPad for an undecided user, it would depend a bit more on the intended usage.  If the user is really only looking for the 5 or 6 things most folks do on a portable device (email, calendar, contacts, web browsing, reading .pdf files and Office docs), then the iPad is a better choice due to its limited nature, ease of support, great battery life, etc.  If the user has special software and hardware needs like so many of our groups do, then having a real Windows Desktop and a USB port are key to having a portable device that really works.

 

Sorry I am not very good at keeping it short.