I got totally fed up by the damn Asus EeeSlate as the Wacom digitizer kept throwing me curve ball. After reading a blog about how drawing with Wacom stylus being such an awesome experience, I headed to a local Windows Store to give Surface Pro a spin.
This is kind of ironic, cause I brought my EeeSlate at the exact same store.
So I tried Surface Pro, and I even tried it with Sketchbook Pro 6.0. At the end, I was pissed, like ultra pissed. Why? Because for every single freaking Surface Pro I tried, they ALL have digitizer problem at the upper left corner. (I tried more than 6 Surface Pro devices) I even convinced a lady at the store to enter the admin code so that I can re-collaborate the screen (by the way, that another dude at the store had some serious attitude problem, which is NOT the user experience you want a flag ship store should deliver). Eventually, I decided to never consider Surface Pro in my life ever again.
To my surprise, I tried Sony Duo 11, and I was pretty pleased by the digitizer It was way way more accurate than my EeeSlate and Surface Pro. I still have my X60T digitize better, but then that was a different technology.
So is Sony Duo 11 a keeper. Hell no! Mainly because of the damn crappy keyboard. Key arrangement is stupid, and I don't understand why they wasted all those space on the keyboard area by making those keys tiny. In fact, I typed most of the blog on that keyboard and it was a horrible experience.
And speaking of horrible experience, I wasn't pleased by my experience in the Microsoft Store. Remember I mentioned a while ago that pissed-off employee who seemed wasn't pleased about being required to enter admin password in order for me to collaborate the digitizer again? I was also not happy about more than one staff member there asking me to take off the thumb drive I brought along. I use it to keep my Sketchbook Pro 6, which is the application that made me consider buying a freaking $1400+ device. I've done it once by following the protocol of buying the device, bring it home, and then try out with my drawing app. What did a got? A shitty Eee Slate that has off-track Wacom digitizer surface. And I got the exact same result after swapping 2 other machines. So I have enough. I will not spend my money unless I know it does exactly what I want. And I thought that is what showroom is for.
Also, they have all sort of not working machines in the show up. All the Asus Taichi machines in the show room had touch screen disabled. I knew that indeed the machines had problem because even the employee there wasn't able to find a Taichi that worked. Microsoft Store is supposed to be a public face of the company, then I can see why so many people still hate Microsoft.
OK, something positive though: I tried out several Windows Phone 8, including the super low end Lumia 520. And I was actually pretty pleased by the performance. They were smooth and very responsive. Of course, there's no complicated apps to stress test the device, but at least, unlike Surface Pro, I had some good experience with them.
By the way, I am not the only one who rant about the digitizer problem on Surface Pro.
No comments:
Post a Comment