Quick review over the course of the day playing with this.
Screen: Beautiful, much brighter than the ipad, but also a bit cooler which I'm not sure I like. Very responsive to touch. Metro is made for touch, no issues there, but in desktop mode you have a lot of little x's and minimize buttons and such so accuracy seems slightly reduced there. The screen is a HUGE magnet for fingerprints, much more so than the ipad.
Battery
henomenal. When I unboxed it I had about 10%, charged for an hour or so and got to 75% or so, I've used it for about 6 hours web browsing, installing software, playing one game, etc and it's about 55% right now. Going to try some videos on it tomorrow.
CPU: Here is the BIG question IMO, how does it handle what I throw at it. Well I haven't thrown much in all honesty, I'll put photoshop elements on it tomorrow. So far the CPU is a mixed bag, but much better than the old single core Atom in last years netbooks. Opening stuff at times has a 2-3 second lag, as opposed to the ipad instantly opening pretty much everything, but it's only occasionally or if something big is going on. I installed Office365 and played around, but I don't think it's ready for prime time, I am guessing that it's the softwares fault. I loaded up a greeting card in Word and it seems everytime I click on the picture the program would lock up, I gave up after several tries. Powerpoint crashed the first time I opened it, didn't try again. OneNote opened and function fine, as an aside the handwriting recognition is insanely good, but the programs are odd in that your palm can still resize/zoom the screen. I believe there is a way to turn off palm/capacative recognition and only use stylus input, but I'm not sure on that.
I also had 3 or 4 crashes, just flat out OS freezes that I had to reboot. No rhyme or reason, once I was doing the Word thing, another time I was simply web browsing in Metro IE10. Once my internet stopped working and a reboot fixed it. Other than those I must say it's a very smooth experience, it's just insane that I have full Windows on a tablet like this.
Graphics: Web pages load very quickly. I'm used to the ipad 3's abysmal speed at loading graphic rich webpages, it's just awful, so I was nicely surprised at how fast the Samsung was. I played one game which looked very nice, kind of on a dungeon hunter graphics level. Also one thing MS made a big deal of is there clear text, IMO it's a mixed bag. Text on the Samsung looked very nice, but not nicer than the ipad, but not worse either. But the caveat is when zooming in and out the Samsungs text would pixelate quite a bit then readjust and look nice, the ipad was pretty rock solid when zooming in and out. I think MS has some work ahead of them optimizing this, I can see this being a big deal when people start complaining about the resolution.
UI: Desktop mode is pretty awesome, but we run into the same issue we did 10 years ago with PocketPC. It's a pain to click a tiny x to close a program for example. I haven't even attempted to change DPI, but I know from other PCs I've had that wreaks havoc with certain programs. It's not bad at all, but it's not the ipad or metro either. Metro on the other hand is insanely nice for touch, but there are some VERY weird design decisions I'd like to smack a MS developer for. Case in point, you don't have access to bookmarks in Metro IE10, yeah seriously. You can pin a webpage, you can have favorites, but the way they are laid out after about 10 there are just too many, I'm sure we all have at least hundreds of book marks. No such limitation in the desktop version though, still a horribly stupid design decision. Many of the Metro programs were kind of weird that way, but I'll admit I didn't play much with them, preferring to install the desktop version. MS has a long road to go with Metro and currently it seems they need to step it up 10 notches if they ever want to compete.
That's about most of what I played around with today. Anything in particular anyone wants me to look at? I must say I'm still selling my ipad, even though I think the ipad is a better device when it comes to the basics, web browsing and such, it's still such an incredible freedom to have a real OS in front of me, to visit flash sites with no issues, to basically do what I want just like I do in front of my laptop/desktop. Yes there are some tradeoffs so far, lets hope MS steps up to the plate. They put out a hell of an initial offering, lets just hope they follow through, because if they do it will be incredible, if they don't it will be a big flop.
