Microsoft Surface Pro X review: This isn’t the long-lasting tablet we were hoping for - townsendmosis1960
Mark Hachman / IDG
At a Glimpse
Expert's Rating
Pros
- Jackanapes and sturdy
- Beautiful screen, as familiar
- An excellent typing experience, though not on your lap
Cons
- App compatibility issues and some bugs
- Good, though non overly impressive battery life
- USB-C ports are late, and lack Thunderclap
Our Finding of fact
Microsoft's modernized Rise tablet bathroom't overcome a rash of bugs and average bombardment life, though the integrated eSIM and cellular time slot offer on-the-pop off connections.
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Microsoft's Surface In favor X was supposititious to signal a modern chapter for Qualcomm's raid Windows PCs and tablets, matchless where battery life was no longer the sole marketing point. To its credit, the new, semi-custom-built Microsoft SQ1 chip (based on the Snapdragon 8cx) delivers improvements in graphics and performance. We also appreciate the visual aspect of USB-C and a marvelously-engineered write cubby.
Merely in a baffling bend of events, the Surface Pro X waterfall short in bombardment life. Lag, the app compatibility issues and bugs that are an unfortunate staple of Snapdragon-power-driven PCs stay on. Maybe IT can be tolerated in a system like the Samsung Galaxy Book 2, which delivered 18 hours of battery life. But not the Surface Affirmative X, with a mere 8 to 10 hours. The tired cantillate of "this is a new computer architecture, give it any time," doesn't fly sheet anymore. When a bug Beaver State another issue pops skyward—and it probably will—it's painful.
Mark Hachman / IDG Pull the keyboard out a bit, and the Grade-constructed Pen is exposed in its charging cubby.
Microsoft Surface In favour of X basic specs
- Display: 13-inch (2880×1920) PixelSense exhibit, multi-touch
- Processor: 3GHz Microsoft SQ1
- Graphics: Microsoft SQ1 Adreno 685
- Retentivity: 8GB/16GB (8GB as proven)
- Storage: 128GB/256GB/512GB SSD (128GB as tested)
- Ports: 2 USB-C, 1 Surface Connect, 1 nanoSIM, Grade-constructed keyboard connexion
- Camera: 5MP/1080p (user facing); 10MP autofocus with 1080p/4K video options
- Bombardment: 38.9Wh (reportable)
- Wireless: WI-Fi5/802.11ac; Bluetooth 5; Snapdragon X24 LTE modem with nanoSIM operating theater eSIM
- Operating system: Windows 10 Home
- Dimensions (inches): 11.3 x 8.2 x 0.28 in.
- Weight: 1.72 pounds; 2.37 with keyboard and pen); 2.99 with courser
- Color: Black
- Optional accessories: Surface Professional X Touch Keyboard with Slim Pen BundleRemove not-product link ($270)
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Price: $999 to $1,499; $971.49 at Amazon
Surface Pro X: Stunning physical design
Little has changed from our first impression of the Surface Pro X: IT's a Surface Pro pill, revved up for a new contemporaries of tablet users. Interest in tablets has apparently decreased somewhat, given the lack of third-party Windows tablets we've seen recently. Merely Microsoft's Surface tablets are known for their aerodynamic, snazzy physical designs, and the Surface Pro X lives up to its legacy.
Don't block, withal, that you'll be tacking on an outrageous $270 for just the keyboard (and penitentiary), a realistic requisite. That's the Price of a Chromebook or a tasteless screen background.
The Slim Pen pen is a delight, though. In a few years, this design detail (first spied in January, in Dell's Inspiron 13 and 15 7000 Black Edition laptops) Crataegus laevigata live duplicated enough to get over ubiquitous, much like tablet kickstands today. Only discovering the pen merely can't help educe the thought:oh, they've finally solved it. It even has a small charging weak. I have no idea what the pen's shelling life is, because IT's essentially always being emotional when non in use.
Mark Hachman / IDG If you remove the Melt off Pen, a popup offers to launch the Microsoft Whiteboard app.
The playpen's cubby, in add-on to charging the pen, magnetically flips IT if you tuck it incorrectly. The Windows logo should berylliumupwardly, and the Surface Pro X volition rotate it if it's not properly oriented.
Microsoft describes the Surface Pro X chassis design as "key signature anodized aluminum with carbon composite fanless energy cooling," a puffed way of describing how light, sturdy, and cool it all is. I ne'er detected more than just a bit of warmth.
The kickstand reclines not quite to 180 degrees, with just a bit of flex in it for drawing purposes. The kickstand is stiff and supportive across the entire range of motion, giving a lot Thomas More ergonomic flexibility than a more traditional clamshell, which generally reclines to about 45 degrees off the horizontal.
Mark Hachman / IDG The Microsoft Surface In favor of X in full recline. The kickstand is astonishingly resilient, providing a fairly steady inking surface with just a bit of jounce.
"Lappability" remains a subject of taste. I'm screen out of finished the "let's wreak with a tablet on your lap" charade. Yes, it's realistic. Yes, the attractable grip betwixt the Come on Pro X keyboard and the tablet is rattling, and you shouldn't have to worry about cracking it if it tips over your knees. Actually, however, the Surface In favor of X works best on a hard table or desk.
Aerofoil In favor X: Display and ports
The Surface Pro X display pumps out a fantastic 448 nits of measured brightness, meaning it can be victimised even in the cheerfulness. (Remember, show brightness also has an unfavourable upshot on battery life.) Two semblance profiles are supported: Enhanced and sRGB. The slimmed-down bezels permit the Surface Pro X to shoehorn its 13-inch screen into a smaller overall visibility. This is the kind of functional alteration fans have been asking for. If you're a Surface Dial user, it doesn't support on-screen expend, though you can purpose it as an off-concealment, external peripheral.
Mark Hachman / IDG A piar of USB-C ports (and a volume rock 'n' roll musician) adorn the left side of the Microsoft Surface Pro X…
The addition of a pair of USB-C ports brings the Surface Pro X in line with other modern tablet designs. They'rhenium non Thunderbolt-battery-powered, however, so your options for connecting an external ride herd on remain limited. Because the Control surface Pro X jettisons USB-A, miniDisplayPort, and microSD, you'll need a USB-C hub to connect bequest devices (a miserable investment afterward spending over $250 on the keyboard).
St. Mark Hachman / IDG …piece the Surface Connect connector and the power button are on the flop side.
I was able to connect to an external 4K reveal perfectly cured using the Opencut Dock, but when I added a second, 1080p display, the 4K display connective became unreliable. (A direct connection to an external display worked fine.) You would think that a company the likes of Microsoft, which owns the OSand manufactures the hardware, would work out these issues.
On the butt of the Surface Pro X is a kind of delightfully engineered panel that can be popped off using a SIM tool. Indoors hides a SIM slot, also as the user-convenient SSD. Microsoft says the removeable SSD is intended for information portability, and you'll have to look long and hard to find compatible SSDs for this small space anyway. A small magnet helps conduct the panel back into place, a reflective project detail.
That's a good point of departure to talk about one of the Surface Professional X's strengths: wireless.
Mark Hachman / IDG The Surface Pro X SIM time slot hides beneath the kickstand, and underneath a removable metal cover.
Information technology's no secret that we favor always-on, always-adjacent PCs, simply because you can do more with a device that can run entirely day and connect to the Internet. LTE-capable Come out Pro devices tended to abide by the original instauratio by approximately six months, merely Microsoft has yet to herald an LTE-sure-footed Surface In favor 7. From a connectivity standpoint, the Surface Pro X is it.
The Surface Pro X uses Qualcomm's X24 LTE modem, supporting the major LTE bands used away all four U.S. carriers, as healthy as the bands used in Asia and Europe. You should be able to connect worldwide.
And IT's here that the Come up Pro X shines. Using Microsoft Office operating theater the Web while connected the roadworthy, with all-day battery life, has been what the Surface batting order should have aspired in the beginning. If you neglect the fact that your earphone does essentially the same thing, and you potty likely tether IT to your laptop as good—well, there's something amazingly freeing about carrying around a whippersnapper, all-daytime, always-engaged device. It's simply peace of brain.
Mark Hachman / IDG Working via cellular is terrific, but trying to character on a swaying BART train isn't the best experience.
Surface Pro X: Keyboard, speakers and camera
I was surprised to find that I virtually enjoyed typing connected the Surface Pro X to a higher degree our recently-reviewed Surface Laptop 3. Surface Pro keyboard keyboards have always felt a bit looser, dating back out to one of my favorites, the Surface Pro 3. Piece the Surface Laptop computer 3's keys were a second along the stiff pull, I liked the Surface In favor X keyboard's mix of resiliency and comfort. The precision touchpad is first-rate, clickable ahead to the selfsame top of the show.
Mark Hachman / IDG The Surface Pro X keyboard holds No surprises…well, except for the Surface Pen beneath IT, of course.
Microsoft has always believed in a unfearing audio experience. The Surface In favor of X continues that custom, with powerful speakers that belie the tablet's relatively small size. Dolby Audio Premium comes bundled, with its own options for stereo widening and audio equalization. The Surface Pro X falls into the petite mathematical group of tablets and laptops who you South Korean won't mind listening to audio without headphones.
Oh—more or less those headphones? Microsoft decided to eliminate the headphone jack. You'll feature to use either Bluetooth-powered headphones or earbuds, OR else buy a USB-C to 3.5-mm dongleRemove non-production link.
Grade Hachman / IDG Take a picture with the rear-facing camera with the Photographic camera app and the Whiteboard button…
Normally, exploiter-facing cameras are bare-bones 720p models for videoconferencing. Microsoft gives you a 5MP user-facing camera, good for 1080p, as swell atomic number 3 a surprisingly good 10MP rear tv camera with HDR and autofocus.
The tv camera app is integrated with the Microsoft Whiteboard app, which means you can snap a pic of a whiteboard, flatbottomed at an lean, and the app will transform it into an image which you can redact and mark up. It's a capability that's unique to the tablet—Microsoft's Surface Laptops lack a rear-cladding camera for doing this.
Mark Hachman / IDG …And Whiteboard outputs what information technology captures into an figure of speech that you can differentiate up.
All these features are nice, but what near carrying out? Hold over reading to learn Thomas More.
Performance: Real-world use
Living with the Qualcomm-settled Surface In favor X is somewhat like realistic with a Windows 10 S machine: Within the ecosystem of Microsoft apps—Edge, Office, the basic apps like Mail and Calendar—the Turn up Pro X feels decently quick. IT performed the mainstream tasks that I need to action (web browsing, word processing, video playback, email, and so on) quickly and responsively. Slake (though just the 32-bit version) worked simply satisfactory. It's nearly immediately antiphonal as startup, which makes information technology feel energizing and buoyant. The beta version of Butt against (or Edgeium) is rattling accelerated. Adobe's Creative Cloud is heading to the Surface Pro X, but isn't here quite withal.
Once you exit that safe room, though, it's a mixed bag. Pages blind drunk snappily with both Chrome and Firefox Every night (supposedly optimized for ARM)—merely entirely after unexhausted totally blank for a arcsecond or two on a fast home system connection. Draw a blank about playing games: The Microsoft Entrepot app pushed games like Mah-Jongg at me, and wouldn't run the Xbox genus Beta app. I resigned myself to testing Asphalt 8, about the only when game I could course when I've dependable previous Qualcomm platforms, as well.
Recollect, even though the rendering of Windows 10 on the Surface Pro X is a 64-bit operating system, it won't run a 64-bit app that's been typewritten for the X64 computer architecture. In fact, there's a whole list of caveats that Microsoft itself has promulgated: Much games North Korean won't workplace (anti-cheating software North Korean won't run on ARM), some antivirus apps won't act, and thusly on. It's a minefield that threatens to blow up what you want to bash on an ARM-based machine, and as such requires careful navigation.
In reviewing the Surface Professional X's prices online, I also skimmed some of the Amazon reviews, and I have to consort with this statement: "Solely a subset of Windows software will run along this computer, and only a subset of that subset will run at full speed."
Performance: Benchmarks
Because of the limitations of the ARM architecture, we were healthy to run entirely a couple of of our normal suite of benchmarks. We too had to make over a new, smaller group of comparable products. We were nevertheless able to bracket the Surface Pro X's performance: It's somewhat to a lesser degree some of Microsoft's older products that are based on Intel's 7th-gen Core chips.
Our comparison products admit the Lenovo Yoga C630, which uses the SQ1's predecessor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850; our Editor's Choice-award successful tablet, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet (3rd Gen); the Microsoft Surface Go tablet; the first-generation Microsoft Surface Laptop computer, and the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (Congress of Racial Equality i7). We didn't have a Surface Favoring 7 tablet to test, but the Surface Laptop 3 (Inwardness i7) uses the Lapplander Sparkler Lake processor.
For our test suite, we first chose the PCMark 10 Apps benchmark, which restricts testing to the three principal Office apps (Word, Stand out, and PowerPoint, plus the EdgeHTML version of Microsoft Edge.) Information technology's near as real-world as you ass get. Call back, Qualcomm claimed that it could execute as well as a Core i5 with its 8cx in this test. Our results put it a notch lower along the totem ro.
Mark Hachman / IDG Qualcomm is delivering the Lapp PCMark 10 Apps score as it promised earlier this twelvemonth. In miscellaneous, however, other, older devices perform much break.
The web-supported complement to the PCMark benchmarking rooms is WebXPRT 3 by Principled Technologies, which runs a serial of JavaScript and HTML benchmarks to determine how well the Surface In favor of X will make out in vane apps. As with the PCMark test, the Airfoil Pro X's scores are mundane.
Nock Hachman / IDG The Open Pro X keeps up here, simply ease can't top its aging competition.
To emphasize multimedia applications, including video editing, photo manipulation, and light gaming, the PCMark 8 Creative benchmark fills the bill. Here, once again, the Surface Pro X is outpaced by experienced, purportedly slower machines.
Mark Hachman / IDG When the Surface Go outperforms you, that's not a bully sign.
Underwriter Labs made a special version of its 3DMark graphics benchmark for ARM-power-driven machines, that pot be keep going both x86 as well as ARM-founded systems. This allows us to do some cross-platform benchmarking of the Surface Pro X's integrated Adreno GPU, and equivalence it to the integrated chips in the Core and Ryzen processors. Here, the Surface In favou X does surprisingly well.
Mark Hachman / IDG Eventually! Qualcomm's Adreno core shines. In graphics, the SQ1 performs quite fountainhead, comparatively.
Performance: The shelling lifespan boondoggle
Distilling a product down into a single dimension can be a dangerous stereotype. But then, Qualcomm's whole argument for the Snapdragon 8cx or the Microsoft SQ1 has been totally-Clarence Shepard Day Jr. battery life-time, with draw near present connectivity. Unluckily, the Surface Pro X's battery life was everywhere the map.
Manufacturers have been pushing hard for us to test products in the real planetary and avoid synthesized utilisation cases. But they aren't quotable. That's the kicker—we don't cognize if, or when, an update to Photoshop leave impact performance, or by how a great deal. With that said, we do test each product under real-world scenarios, A advisable Eastern Samoa with recorded benchmarks.
Therein case, we took four separate approaches. Typically, we intertwine a 4K TV until the battery expires, with earbuds plugged in. This simulates one experience: watching downloaded movies happening a transoceanic flight. In this example, because the Open In favor X lacks a headphone jack, we tried two things: We streamed audio ended Bluetooth to a pair of headphones, and one by one, we used a USB-C to 3.5-millimetre dongle to perform the same test.
We tested using PCMark 10's battery test, performing a scripted mix of Office apps and Web browsing. I also secondhand the Surface Pro X in a day's work, working on the Bay Area's Baronet subway on the way to work, and then along a background performing my day's work.
The Show u Pro X's battery life is unobjectionable for a tablet or a laptop, but well fleeting of the lofty promises of "25 hours." Yes, the size of the battery matters. So does the fact that the SQ1 is a semi-customs duty potato chip that's been tweaked for functioning.
Mark Hachman / IDG The Surface Pro X gets simply just insufficient of 9 hours on a USB-C dongle, which is sufficient but not particularly impressive.
But let's get a load at the numbers. We've used the dongle-streaming number as the all but comparable to our other tests.
- Streaming over Bluetooth: 445 transactions, OR 6 hours, 25 minutes.
- Streaming over a USB-C dongle: 521 minutes, or 8 hours, 41 minutes.
- PCMark 10's battery test: 503 minutes, or 8 hours, 23 transactions.
- Real-earthly concern: 346 minutes, or 6 hours, 46 minutes.
That last number was a trifle of a shocker, as you would think that'd be the all but accurate test of the Control surface Pro X's battery animation. But my tests simply reflected what I do during an average day: I horde to BART, found a hind end happening the caravan, abutting via the Surface Pro X's integrated cellular connection, and used Excel, Word, the Send app, and the built-in Boundary client. At work, I remained on cellular.
Mark Hachman / IDG This is what Windows's powercfg service reported while using the Surface Pro X on the run short.
It's worth noting that I had performed a battery rundown test the night before, so I had only managed to charge it to 72 percent away the sentence I left. But that meant that I was at 4 percent battery aside 12:49 PM, which extrapolated out to under 7 hours of use. Unacceptable.
Surface Pro X: Some of the glitches
Living with the Grade-constructed Pro X also forces you to acknowledging that not everything works—a carry on-breaker correctly away for some, especially where apps are concerned. But I was rattling stung to take out out the Coat Pro X, connect IT to the tried-and-true Surface Dock—and and then find out that the mouse cursor showed up super intermittently. (IT later fixed itself aft an update.) We also use a third-party VPN to connect to our arena, which refused to connect at totally either over alveolate or ethernet. Then the Microsoft Movies & TV app (which we use for our video rundown battery test) started glitching, starting and fillet over and over. What more gotchas rest in wait?
Conclusion: This is not a Surface "Pro" anything
After years of biscuit-cutter upgrades, the Surface Pro X delivers a well-mentation-out physical redesign. Again, however—and this is getting tiring by now—app compatibility, performance issues and bugs complicate Microsoft's effort. Calling information technology an "Edgebook" isn't quite right, because the Surface In favour of X runs Office and other Microsoft apps well. But it still feels somewhat short of an actual PC.
One redeeming factor that we haven't touched much upon is the price: $999 for our base model isn't bad…merely it's still almost $200 more the Core i5/8GB/128GB worthy Microsoft Surface Pro 7Remove non-product link.
We reviewed Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Tablet (3rd Gen)eighteen months ago, with a 13-inch 2K display, an 8th-gen Core central processor, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3, and a nanoSIM time slot—and a bundled pen and keyboard. These all match operating theater exceed what the Surface Pro X delivers. The ThinkPad's big letdown was battery aliveness, which the Surface Pro X easily surpasses away about 90 minutes—but it's not even close to the promises of truly all-day battery life, which Qualcomm antecedently delivered upon in sooner machines like the Asus NovaGo and Samsung Galaxy Record 2.
The question that I Bob Hope Microsoft is asking itself is: What powerful reason has it given for customers to corrupt the Surface Pro X? Always-on connectivity? It's non a unparalleled argument, and one that Intel itself is gunning for. We haven't tested Microsoft's Surface Pro 7, simply we'd arrogate that that's its best tablet, not the Come on Pro X. With this tablet, we can't see why Microsoft would use the term "Pro" at all.
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As PCWorld's senior editor program, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and break off engineering science, among other beats. He has formerly engrossed for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/398356/microsoft-surface-pro-x-review.html
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