Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Hands-on, First Impressions & Photo Gallery

I have been a Mac users from many years, the reason primarily being that the Macbook offers an amazing experience, bundled into a very slimmer & a lighter profile under the Air series. There has been no reason to think about a switch only except that I’m reporting at events, travelling on a flight, or sitting on my bean bag while watching TV, because at those moments the Keyboard feels like a barrier. I wish I could just fold it off & convert the computer into a tablet. Few years back Microsoft announced the first Surface Tablet that came with a detachable keyboard helping you to convert a normal tablet into a desktop that I had purchased, but the experience was not that great since it was the Surface RT.

Years later, in the last month i.e. October 2015, Satya Nadella the CEO at a private event in the US had announced a series of products that included the Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, Lumia 950 & 950XL. Today at the “Future Unleased” event in India, that was a celebration of 25 years of Microsoft, Satya had announced about the launch of few of these products in India in the coming months.

Since I had a very limited time on the all new Surface Pro 4 that comes with a detachable keyboard & a pen, here are my first impressions on the same. The tablet or a convertible laptop from Microsoft comes with a Surface Pen that has been introduced after the Pencil that Apple had launched at the iPhone 6s & iPhone 6s Plus Launch in the US. You just have to double click the way you would on a normal pen & the OneNote application would open up. The same also comes with a Rubber on the back that you can just swipe on the screen & would work in a similar way like the rubber works on your actual paper.

We cannot talk about the display, specifications & the hardware experience because what was more important was the experience around the product. When i tried using the PEN on the OneNote application, it was not registering all the content written & had the same experience while rubbing with the rubber on the back of the detachable Surface Pen. Check out the following GIF to get an idea on how this works.

Trying out the Microsoft Surface Pen on the Surface Pro 4 at #FutureUnleashed event.

A post shared by Amit Bhawani (@amitbhawani) on Nov 5, 2015 at 1:40am PST

Also when you look into the kickstand of the Pro 4, it felt more fragile when compared with the Surface RT, probably because the hinges didn’t flip quickly. In short this is an interesting product, that does not really look polished but is promising & something that I can switch to from the Macbook considering that it can easily manage all the applications i use on a day to day basis. Lets also hope that Microsoft would launch it at a price below Rs 70000, considering that at the current conversion rates the pricing of this device in the US is $899 (INR 60000).

Stay tuned for our coverage at the Indian Launch where we cover the pricing & the offerings from Microsoft in the coming weeks.