hi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech and this is the surface pro X and I've been
using this for the past week or so and this is a device I really want to love
but it has some good things about it but it also has quite a few bad things about
it so I wanted to talk about the good and the bad and then at the end I'll
give my overall opinion of the surface pro X now the first good thing is its
overall design this is the future of Microsoft Surface devices it still has
the kickstand which is great and it's very durable you can push it all the way
to the back and it won't break so if you're drawing on it and resting your
arm it works fine the overall design is great it still has the surface connector
which will be great for a lot of people and it will fast charge with the surface
connector so this will charge up very very quickly and then they've moved the
power button to the same side as the surface connector on the right side now
on the bottom we do have a different connector for the actual keyboard so let
me pop this off here briefly you'll see the connectors different so that may be
a bad thing for some people but they had to do that to thin the device down and
then also on the other side we now have two USB sea ports which we can charge
through and charge pretty fast if you're using say a macbook charger and the
devices turned off if you're using it it actually slows the charge they've also
moved the volume button above those ports so overall we've got modern ports
and the design just feels really good it's very rigid it's now made out of
aluminum and you also have a 4k camera on the back the overall design is great
and that leads me to the front of it where the display is also quite good
it's a high resolution display which has some bad things about it but you won't
see the pixels or anything and if you want all the specs you can see my
unboxing video but the overall display is great to look at it has great viewing
angles it looks great at pretty much any angle even if it's at this angle it's
fine but it is a bit reflective as you can see there's a light behind me but
it's a bit reflective as you can see and it's just great overall you have your
windows hello cameras and they work really well and that's also a positive
with the keyboard because the keyboard fits on it well and also now houses the
new slim pen and so you've got the same great travel with the keyboard the
keyboard is backlit and then you've got a glass trackpad which is nice and large
you don't really get a choice of color right now you just have this black color
with Alcantara or Alcantara and then the surface pen which charges in here so if
you put it down the wrong way it will actually flip itself over and then sort
of write itself so it's kind of nice that way
very slim and fits in there well and I'll talk more about the pen in just a
moment but the travel of the keyboard and everything makes this a great
keyboard I've heard of some people saying that it flexes too much I really
didn't have that issue but I think it's great overall now the next good thing is
the battery now originally some people were not getting good battery life
others were but Microsoft actually pushed an update after this came out and
it seems to have fixed it I would expect about 10 hours with regular use if
you're using it heavily it's going to be less if you're using it just to watch
video you may even get up to the 13 hours that Microsoft suggests I wasn't
able to see that really I had to charge it a couple times but overall it's it's
a pretty good battery it's along the lines of what you would get from even
maybe better than some surface pro 7s or surface pro sixes for example right
around that time 10 hours is kind of the best number and it seems to work well
now as far as the next positive thing the speakers are pretty good so let me
unlock it here you'll see it unlocks quickly what's with Windows hello and
maybe if I go to I'll go to my we'll go here and then we'll go to YouTube maybe
so this is my surface pro X unboxing let me make it fullscreen and then you can
hear the actual speakers turn the brightness up a little bit and you'll
hear the speakers they're nice and loud
the speakers are nice and loud but as they get to higher volumes they
do get a little bit tinny they're not amazing but they sound fine if you
compare them to say an iPad pro they're not on that level but they're as good as
any other surface I've ever heard now along with the display the pen works
great so if I hit the button here will pop open notes or our whiteboard here it
takes a second to open we'll just create a new one and the pen works really well
it's very responsive and fast so if I write Zolo tech
the pen is a little weird to hold because it's kind of like a carpenter's
pen but it works well and the lag and responsiveness is great you can flip it
around and use it as a as an eraser just like you could with the other surface
pens and it's just very responsive so if you like taking notes or screen
capturing and things with the pen this will work fine for you it feels like any
of the others it's durable even though it's plastic it feels durable and it
Wireless wirelessly charges so you never really have to worry about that so if I
hit the button again you'll see it pops right open
I can hit create new and just say hi for example it works well and it's very very
fast so that's definitely a positive there's no lag no issues with that and
if you're into drawing and things that will be great for you now the the next
positive thing for me is that this supports LTE no matter which
configuration you get you can use a SIM card with it so for example I used
Verizon with it currently I don't have it in here but I tried a Verizon SIM
card and I was able to get very high speeds I had great signal in the area
where I would normally get five bars I was able to get five bars and I had 100
down by 30 up so it depends where you're at what you'll get but it's very nice
and very easy to change so if you grab a SIM card removal tool you've got a
little hole here in the back of the surface Pro X pop in the SIM card
removal tool try that again it pops open this little door here it's a little
aluminum door and then you have a nano SIM card port slide it in there and then
there's a utility on the desk top hit connect and that's all you have to do so
it works really well and it's very simple and that leads me to the next
positive thing is we have upgradable SSDs or replaceable now it's
questionable whether or not you can upgrade this because you'd have to find
this small size so in theory if you could find a 512 gigabyte one you could
upgrade it but you would have to find it but it does make it more serviceable so
if your SSD fails or maybe you had the 128 gigabyte model you can bring it to
Microsoft and they'll upgrade it for you for a fee so it's very easy to do it's
just one simple screw and it pops right out so that's a really nice addition but
that leads me to the the first negative thing
and there's no expandable storage we no longer have an SD card slot so where we
used to have it on this side it's just not there so what you have here is all
you get you can of course plug in external
storage with the USB C but you can't plug it in to the actual laptop itself
or tablet now the other negative thing is despite having LTE it does not have
Wi-Fi 6 like the surface pro 7 does now this is not a huge negative since Wi-Fi
6 is not that prevalent but it doesn't have it so in the future if you did have
Wi-Fi 6 you're not able to get that but you do have 802 dot 11 AC so no problems
there now before I talk about programs and speed I want to talk about the
display a little bit and while I said the display looks great which is true
the display has severe PWM or pulse width modulation and that's the way it
manages brightness and I've talked about this in other videos but if I bring the
brightness down you'll see down to about 50% if I bring it up to about 75 that
stops but at 50 it's severe PWM this is actually you can't see this with your
eyes but it's actually flickering to adjust the brightness as I bring it down
you'll see that it actually changes so I bring it up to 75 it stops and it's fine
but if you can't use it above 75% and that bothers you it's going to give you
headaches if you're sensitive to that about 1 in 10 people are sensitive to
screen flicker or PWM and this definitely has it so just keep that in
mind if you're looking at this now this has Microsoft's sq 1 chip in it and I
normally would label this as a positive because it is a great idea with a great
chip and in general it's pretty fast but when you're using it as a full-blown
Windows laptop I'm not so great sure it's a great thing so for example when I
started using this before the update they've said that you can use Chrome on
it with no problem and chrome does load let me bring this down here a little bit
Chrome does load and if we go to say Microsoft you'll see it takes a second
to load and it's fine it Scrolls fine and everything else but I found that
Chrome locked up an awful lot and that was a bit of a pain for me but then they
came out with the edge beta the new Microsoft edge and this works really
well it definitely works than Chrome and you can watch 4k YouTube
videos and things on it works really well that way so I'm not sure if this is
a negative but if you want to use Chrome it's not that great of an experience it
definitely lags at times and just doesn't work as well as say using edge
does so just if you want to use something that works well use edge
otherwise I'm not really impressed with the way it handles Chrome and with that
sq1 chipset it's an ARM processor so you can only run 32-bit apps and this is
kind of a negative because it has ok benchmarks you'll see here's a benchmark
I captured using what I could with Geekbench it's 726 for single core 2787
from multi-core with Geekbench 5 I also was only really able to use pass mark
and scored 1885 0.3 and that's really all I could run for benchmarks but in
real world use trying different games and different programs
I tried things too I tried some different real world programs that are
for making 3d modeling and things I couldn't run them because they're 64-bit
so a lot of the programs I tried such as AutoCAD some of them that are in the App
Store will work fine but if you have different applications that you want to
run and do real work on it's tough to run anything outside of office an even
office had a little bit of a problem when I tried it so if I go into Excel I
had someone try this and tried to import a very large database so they tried to
import a database that had 800,000 lines in it that wouldn't even load on this so
you definitely can't do that sort of work in Excel in here it wouldn't even
load it took forever even though the file was local it just wouldn't work so
that wouldn't work however it can run certain games that are 32-bit I was able
to run call of duty modern warfare 2 I was able to run portal 2 so if I run
portal here so you'll see it's actually loading portal it will work fine and
it's running it emulated with a 32-bit app so it is a full version of Windows
but you can only run 32-bit apps but this is an awful expensive gaming
machine if you're going to use it for this but let's wait for it to load and
you'll see if I bring the brightness up here you'll see that it actually works
pretty good the settings not on the highest setting but it is
playable at least so you can move around fine if you want to shoot a portal here
or whatever you can do that you'll see it's working so it's playable but I
definitely would not recommend this for someone that wants to do serious work so
you'll see that worked Call of Duty 2 works but World of Goo would not work no
I did try to run some old games with good old games such as Wing Commander 4
it just wouldn't run so it's a very hit or miss and you really shouldn't buy
this if you're looking for gaming anyway and as far as more real work I suppose
with things like 3d modeling or LabVIEW those just won't run so you don't have
the ability to run them because you don't have a 64-bit processor or at
least you can't run 64-bit apps that are designed for Windows itself so you'll
see here we can run Microsoft's paint 3d that's not a problem but you can't run
other things that you really might want to run so forward and Excel it's okay
but not for large files it's just I'm questioning why this is
here to be honest and that leads me to the last negative and that is the price
this is $1,300 without the keyboard and the pen so when you put that in
perspective after tax this is over $1,500 in the United States and for
$1,500 you can get a much higher end version of a surface pro 7 for example
that will run all of the apps you want and will even run some of the games even
better so it's really hard to justify this device as something to recommend at
this point and I really want to like it in my opinion it's a great device and
it's an aspirational device but it's just not there yet the apps aren't there
the programs are not compiled for it and it's just not really for doing serious
work at this point if you need something that's say a Chromebook equivalent it
works fine but it's an awful expensive Chromebook if you just want to browse
the web check email it works great for that and do an occasional Word document
or Excel or any of those things it works well and maybe watch videos and use it
as a consumption device but in general it's just not a great device for
everyday use or gaming or anything else it's mediocre at that
and I really hate to say that but it's the truth it's something that I was
hoping that this would be phenomenal and superfast based off of all the different
CPU specs it's just not that great so overall I can't really recommend it for
its price but if you want to try out something new it's worth trying out but
let me know what you think in the comments below I'll link this wallpaper
in the description as I always do and if you picked one of these up I would love
to know what you're using it for and how it's working for you if you haven't
subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it
a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time