Last year, I tried Surface Pro 3, and I returned it with tons of anger and frustration. Yet, my need for having a digital sketchbook was still not fulfilled. And now that Surface Pro 4 had been released, I told myself that I would like to give Surface line one more try.
To be honest, if iPad Pro releases a month ahead of schedule, then I would not even consider Surface Pro 4 at all, since my sketching need will most probably will fulfilled by iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. But iPad Pro has been arrived yet (as for the moment I type this blog), and I am heading to Hong Kong a few days later. My options are getting a Surface Pro 4, or use my heavy and short battery life EeeSlate. I finally decided that I deserve to use a better device.
Next I have to decide whether I should get a Surface Pro 4 or a SurfaceBook. I ended up picking Surface Pro 4 because I concern about portability. If I want a power laptop to use during a trip, I can use my office laptop, which has quad core i7 CPU in it. If I want something super light weight, I will use my iPad Air 2. Surface Pro 4 fits in my life by providing a device that is light enough to carry around wherever I go, and yet powerful enough to run my Windows based applications, including several drawing tools like Manga Studio 5, Sketchbook Pro 7 and so on.
So I brought a Surface Pro 4 with i5 process, 8Gb memory and 256Gb harddisk. My expectation on this device was pretty high, even though I had so much problem with Surface Pro 3 before.
The first thing I realized while I was setting up Service Pro 4 was that it DOES NOT work with my generation 1 Type Cover which I brought with a Surface RT. I was a bit disappointed, but not a big deal breaker. I did brought the new Surface Pro 4 Type cover. HOWEVER, I will I'll probably return the one I brought and get the one with fingerprint scanner, because I am I sick and tired of my coworker looking that me typing in my password during meetings. Fingerprint scanner will totally avoid that hassle.
Another thing that frustrated me was that I kept losing Wifi signal when connected to one of the WiFi router at home (the "Hxxxxxx" one). Once I connected to my network "Mxxxx", the connection seemed pretty stable. Still, I'll probably need to verify it when I go to work tomorrow.
Since sketching is my main purpose of getting this device, I installed and fired up SketchBook Pro 7, and tried a bit. The experience was pretty good, and the soft tip on the stylus allows me to sketch without feeling like I was drawing on glasses. There seemed to be a tiny tiny tracking issue which makes me think that I may need to calibrate the pen input, but I even the current non-perfect tracking seemed to be acceptable.
The heat problem that drove me away on first one seemed to be improved. I still felt heat at the back, but I wondered if it's because I am still charging my machine right now.
The new TypeCover is nice to use. The rest area feels good. The tracking seems nice. And the backlit will be a great help when I was using it to type during my trip back to Hong Kong a few days later.
The default 200% resolution setting is too tiny for my to use comfortably. So I switched to 225% and that seemed to work better for me.
The fact that I only have a single USB 3.0 port is indeed a hassle to me. I cannot connect to both my USB 3.0 harddisk and my XBox360 joypad at the same time. I will need to see if I can find a USB 3.0 hub to allow me to work around this problem.
Some of my "portable" application, like SketchBook Pro 7, didn't work right away, but installing Visual Studio 2012 C++ Distributable package solved the problem.
I then tried Manga Studio 5. Just like what I experienced last year with Surface Pro 3, the default Wintab setting didn't work, and I had to switch to TabletPC mode, but then I lost the zoom gesture. Fortunately, this time Microsoft provides a WinTab driver. And with that I was able to has pressure sensitivity and zoom gesture at the same time. I did still experienced some tiny tail at the beginning of some strokes when I use G-Pen, but then that's more about more needing to get used to inking style Mange Studio 5 use.
Remote Desktop (both the desktop and Windows Store version) still have that zooming problem. As before, I used to workaround application called "Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.2".
But then there are applications that require a more drastic way to resolve the resolution problem. Like Daz Studio, which is totally useless when in highest resolution with text scaling mode. So everytime when I need to use Daz Studio, I need to set to resolution to 1280 x 800. With that, menu and everything will then look normal on Daz Studio.
Compare with 2 years ago, there are at least some Windows Store apps that makes the tablet experience on Windows 10 better than when it was Windows 8/8.1 . For instead, "Podcast!" is a petty ok Podcast player. For reading ePub books you can use "Liberty". For cbr and cbz Comics/Manga reading you can use "Cover". They don't provide as good the experience as the similar apps on iOS or Android OS, but they do the job nevertheless.
That's all for Day 1.
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