While the Surface Pro has received some very impressive reviews from practically everybody who gets their hands on one, there have been a couple problems popping up.
Storage Space Confusion
Shortly before the first devices hit the shelves, somebody became aware that the available storage space was significantly lower than the ads would seem to indicate. The 128GB model would only allow users to have access to 83GB of space. Anybody would agree that losing about one third of your anticipated drive is a bit excessive, I think.
The real numbers were slightly more forgiving. Once the Surface Pro began to ship, owners found that there was 96GB of free space on each device. That’s a pretty big jump, even if we’re still looking at a fair chunk taken up by system files. Not only that, but some of the reserved space can be easily recovered.
Each of these tablets has a complete recovery image included by default. In response to questions, members of the Surface design team explained that it was basically a matter of giving the user everything they might need rather than hoping for the best. If you don’t want that recovery image on your hard drive, there is a built-in utility to relocate it to a flash drive and recover the space. That brings your available storage up to 104GB.
It makes sense for there to be confusion with all this, but despite the apparent inability to get their point across effectively on this occasion there seems to be no major fault on Microsoft’s end.
Stylus Woes
Probably the biggest draw of the Surface Pro compared to its competitors, including the Windows RT model, is the pen digitizer. By allowing for stylus use, all sorts of applications become possible. There are some problems with the initial implementation that have some customers upset, however.
The stylus itself works just fine. Not many applications can really seem to make the most of it yet though. Pretty much none of them can, in face. Photoshop, which would seem to be the ideal test case, can get a lot of use out of it but can’t take advantage of pressure sensitivity. Naturally, that means Photoshop is almost unusable in the situations one would tend to apply a stylus to.
The drivers and APIs do seem to be available. It seems that Microsoft just didn’t do a good enough job of reaching out to their developer partners to make sure that the Surface Pro’s strengths were shown off well.
Overall it seems that things are rapidly improving. It’s possible that they just didn’t realize how big an impact the stylus would have on consumer response, as unlikely as that sounds. This is definitely something that can be fairly simply addressed, it will just have to be taken one app at a time for the moment while we wait on more comprehensive fixes, shortcuts, and refinements.
