For the longest time, I’ve been fascinated by tablet computing. When compared totraditional clamshell laptops, slate-style PCs are not only thinner and lighter, but also more versatile and better suited for media consumption and note-taking. A laptop is shackled to its keyboard base at all times, which is great for lapability, but clumsy in the majority of other use cases.
With the merits of theslate-style form factorbeing so compelling to me, I’ve been rooting for Microsoft to succeed in the tablet space for several years now. If the company could seamlessly blend together the power of thefull-fat Windows OSand the svelteness of iPad-esque hardware, I reckon a lot more PC users (and manufacturers) would take notice.
Microsoft’s latest Surface PCs are compact, lightweight, and missing Surface Connect
The tech giant has just unveiled two new compact Windows 11 PCs: the Surface Pro, 12-inch two-in-one, and the Surface Laptop, 13-inch.
With its latest tablet, the $800 12-inch Surface Pro 1st Edition, Microsoft is leaning into the mobile aspect of the tablet experience to a far greater degree than in years prior. The device is sleeker, rounder, and more compact than its13-inch Surface Pro counterpart, with a Surface Slim Pen 2 charging slot built right into the slate as opposed to being nestled within the optional $150 Keyboard Cover accessory.
With all these seemingly pro-tablet changes in mind, I decided to rip the Keyboard cover off my Surface Pro 12-inch entirely, instead relying solely on the tab’s touch screen and digital stylus for general-purpose computing purposes. I wanted to find out just how far Windows 11 has come as a tablet operating system, and whether the product can hold a candle to theiPadorAndroid slateswhen it comes to navigability, sans mouse, trackpad, and keyboard.
Microsoft Surface Pro, 12-inch
The Microsoft Surface Pro, 12-inch is a compact 2-in-1 Windows 11 PC that ships with a Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 90Hz refresh rate, and support for Copilot+ AI features.
The Surface Pro 12-inch is a refined hardware package
Finally, a Microsoft Surface Pro that has both power and stamina, without the unwieldiness
Right off the bat, it has to be said that the Surface Pro 12-inch is a slam-dunk on the hardware front. Microsoft has been engineering premium tablet hardware for some time now, and this latest model is the culmination of the company’s efforts. The device is incredibly well-built, with a signature full-width kickstand on the back, and aesthetically pleasing symmetrical bezels on the front.
The sold-separately Keyboard cover, which I purposely avoided using for testing purposes, is also well-built. Its exterior is made of a premium suede-like material, keys are backlit with solid travel, and magnets firmly clasp the unit shut and automatically turn the Pro’s display off when closed. While the glass trackpad is of a decent size, I do wish it shipped with haptic feedback as opposed to an older diving board mechanism for clicking.
Critically, the Surface Pro 12-inch is powered by theQualcomm Snapdragon XPlus chipset, which is an ARM-powered system on a chip (SoC) not unlike those found on Android-powered or iPadOS-powered tablets. The chip is a champ when it comes to efficiency-per-watt, allowing for strong computational performance, solid battery life, and minimal heat generation.
While I do wish the unit was ever-so-slightly smaller (think: Surface Go), I think 12-inches is a reasonable balance between compactness and screen readability.
In my testing, the tablet scored aGeekbench 6score of 2,218 in single-core and 4,813 in multi-core. The chassis is entirely fanless, and stamina is reasonable on the whole. Aside from when installing Windows Updates, the device never got hot to the touch, and I never had it run out of juice before the end of a full work day.
Previous Surface Pro models, including the flagship Pro 13-inch 11th generation, feel compromised when compared to the new 12-inch Pro. These older devices are more angular, feature cooling vents, and have footprints that feel just a bit too bulky in the hand for practical use in tablet orientation. With the new 12-inch model, Microsoft made all the right hardware calls. While I do wish the unit was ever-so-slightly smaller (think:Surface Go), I think 12-inches is a reasonable balance between compactness and screen readability.
I’m sorry but my Surface Pro still beats the iPad in 3 key ways
As much as I love my 11-inch Apple iPad Air, Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro 12-inch is the more capable tablet computer overall - here why.
Windows 11 is the root of the Surface Pro’s problems
Microsoft needs to improve its touchscreen UX to better compete with Android and iPadOS
Microsoft’s hardware efforts might be on point with the Surface Pro 12-inch, but software has historically been the thing to make or break a tablet experience. Apple’s iPadOS and Google’s Android OS both excel when it comes to fluidity and ease of use, but they’ve also suffered from subpar window management and multitasking capabilities. By contrast, Microsoft faces the opposite problem: its Windows 11 platform is second-to-none when it comes to productivity, but fluidity and touchscreen navigation are traditional sore points.
When I first removed the Keyboard cover from my own Pro 12-inch, I was worried that I’d stumble across major usability issues right from the get-go. My worries were put to rest when I actually started zipping around the interface with my fingers. As it turns out, Microsoft has been slowly improving the user experience of interacting with Windows via touch, and these incremental tweaks have added up over time.
Moving and resizing app windows is a breeze, thanks to clever visual indicators and a bar for snapping apps into predefined on-screen positions. It’s incredibly easy to maximize an app by swiping it to the top of the screen, and entering split screen with a swipe to the side is intuitive as well. I’m a fan of the dynamically adjusting system taskbar, which automatically grows in size when in tablet mode for easier hitting of touch targets. When apps are launched, the taskbar collapses into a minimized state, which is a great space-saver.
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Swiping up from the taskbar to invokethe Start Menu, as well as swiping up from the bottom right-hand side for quick settings are both handy inclusions, and I’m a big fan of the Touch the screen to wake feature, which works as speedily and consistently as it does on other platforms.
Not everything is perfect, however. The three-and-four finger touch gestures feel a bit clunky, but they’re critical for switching between apps, entering Task View, and minimizing open windows. There’s no gesture available for closing an app entirely, and switching between running apps is a bit of a chore. More damning is touch responsiveness: while some animations are non-linear (as in, they fluidly follow your finger as opposed to playing out a predetermined animation), many others are static and fairly unresponsive.
At the very least, I had a pleasant experience with inking on Windows 11.
In particular, entering into Task View and interacting with the Widgets Board are underwhelming experiences, with choppy, disjointed animations in the former, and a lack of rubber banding in the latter. In settings, you can configure the touch-screen edge gestures to a limited degree, but I’d love to have much more granular control at my disposal.
At the very least, I had a pleasant experience with inking on Windows 11. Microsoft’s $130 Surface Slim Pen 2, which is sold separately, is responsive for notetaking, and the haptic feedback is a nice touch (though it’s only supported in a small handful of first-party apps). The buttons are fully customizable, and handwriting directly into text fields works surprisingly well. The Windows Pen Menu provides quick access to stylus-friendly apps, but the feature feels a bit underbaked in my opinion.
These 5 things are holding Windows 11 back from greatness
Windows 11 is a powerful and feature-rich operating system, but it’s being held back from greatness in several key ways.
As a touch-first tablet, the Surface Pro 12-inch is inching closer to perfection
For content consumption, I can more than get by without Microsoft’s Keyboard accessory
Overall, despite some complaints, we’ve reached a point where it’s entirely possible to get away with using a Surface Pro tablet without traditional mouse, trackpad, or keyboard input methods. Most surface-level user interface elements within Windows are optimized for touch and digital inking, with large hit boxes, a dynamically adjusting taskbar, gestures for accessing critical shell elements, and an excellent virtual keyboard that (mostly) pops up at the right times.
However, work still needs to be done to bring Windows 11 in line with its iPadOS and Android tablet operating system counterparts. Without question, Microsoft needs to optimize touch responsiveness by prioritizing non-linear interface gestures, and it needs to finish porting legacy UI elements over to the touch-friendly Fluent Design / WinUI design language. I’d also like to see the companyreintroduce Windows 8-style gesturesfor closing apps in one swift motion, as well as for flicking through open apps quickly and conveniently.
…I implore Microsoft to do everything in its power to polish the Windows 11 UX with tablet usage in mind.
As it currently stands, Microsoft is closer than ever to cracking the tablet PC code with its latest Surface Pro 12-inch. The product looks, feels, and acts like a tablet to a much greater degree than last year’s Surface Pro 13-inch, and Windows is leaps and bounds better as a tablet OS than it was in theWindows 10and early Windows 11 days. With Apple and Google bothworking to graftdesktop-grade windowing and multitasking functionalities onto their mobile operating systems, I implore Microsoft to do everything in its power to polish the Windows 11 UX with tablet usage in mind, and to do so sooner rather than later.
This device was provided to Pocket-lint by Microsoft.
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