Admit it, we all were quite riveted by the keynote in which Panos Pinay, with a lot of flair and showmanship, launched the Surface Pro 4 and other gadgety awesomeness last month. Well, we got a chance to check out the Surface Pro 4 today at the #FutureUnleashed event in Mumbai and we were quite impressed overall. In the following slides, we give you our quick first impressions of the product.
The kickstand lets you adjust the angle of the screen to quite an extent, almost letting you take it all the way to the back to what my guess is about a 160 degrees (We'll be sure to measure it when we get it for review). While using it on a desk is very comfortable, the whole setup feels a little awkward when using it on your lap. Though we haven't tried it yet, the kind of system followed by the Pixel C using magnetic resistance, might just be better for this particular use case.
The Chiclet-style Type Cover keyboard is quite nice. It offers a wee bit of key travel, which helps enhance the tactile feedback you get while typing. It's interesting that the keyboard is also backlit.
The Surface Pro 4 feels well built. The all magnesium shell looks good and feels quite nice to touch as well. What kind of hardware does it house? It’s powered by 6th Gen Intel Core m3, i5, or i7 CPUs and the RAM can scale from 4GB to 16GB depending on the option you choose. Packing all this in a package that weighs anywhere between 766 to 786 grams is quite something.
The Surface Pen latches onto one of the edges (again magnetically) and doesn’t budge which is a good thing. While one can dismiss it as a regular stylus (and one can, to be honest) it does feel nice. That is the tactile feedback from its tip, the level of friction against the screen feels about right. The screen works in tandem with the Surface Pen offering 1024 levels of sensitivity. That means if you press harder the ink on the screen “flows” thicker.
The magnets on the locking mechanism for the hinge work quite well. You don’t really have to look for the notches or take any special care to align them perfectly. They just click into place seamlessly.
The 12.3-inch PixelSense touchscreen display is vibrant but quite reflective at the same time. Sporting a native resolution of 2736 x 1824, you get pixel density of 267 PPI. The seemingly unusual aspect ratio of 3:2 doesn't really stick out as something odd. We played a 4K video and there weren’t any jitters (obviously Skylake remember?) and the video looked pretty nice. Speakers were loud too. For the size we mean.
Interestingly, when you break away the screen from the keyboard, it automatically shifts into Tablet Mode which makes the UI more touch friendly. How well it functions as a tablet though is something we’ll need to evaluate once we get the device for a proper review. Stay tuned.