- So for many years, people have been asking Microsoft
to release a smaller and more affordable Surface Pro.
Well, they finally obliged and today
we're gonna review the Surface Go.
Does a ten inch Surface really make sense?
What about battery performance?
Can it actually be any good?
Today I'll tell you in my full review, stay tuned.
(techno music)
So here's an idea, take the popular Microsoft Surface Pro
and shrink it down to a 10 inch device.
That's essentially the Surface Go.
But with that change, comes a couple of questions.
For one, is the battery life any good?
Two, what about the processor?
Surface three notoriously underperformed
and it really ruined that device for many.
And number three, what other compromises are there
with a 10 inch Surface?
Well, today I'm happy to tell you that the Surface Go
has actually exceeded my expectations.
I didn't expect such a good device from Microsoft.
But if you wanna know the reasons why
and how I reach this conclusion, well we're gonna deep dive
with the specifications and features.
Taking a closer look at the Surface Go's design,
you can see Microsoft has really honed their skills
on this device.
They have rounded the edges a little bit more
compared the Surface Pro.
That makes it easier, just a little bit nicer
to hold in the hand.
It works really really good.
We do have bold line here
for the antenna and wifi separation.
It's not as nice and elegant as the Surface Pro's
but that's part of the price point here in what you get.
As far as materials used, it's an all magnesium design.
It's exactly like the Surface Pro, they didn't cut
any corners here.
That makes it a very light device too,
just coming in over one pound, or 1.15 pounds,
or 520 grams, that's without the keyboard.
It gets a little heavier with the Alcantara keyboard,
but not by much, this is a very very light and small device.
Looking at the right hand side of the device
we have a Surface connect port, so that's a change
from the original Surface three, and yes that means
you can connect this up to a Surface dock
if you happen to have one.
We also have a USB type C, it's a 3.1 that handles
display power and data,
and you can use any charger you want with that.
If you happen to leave your included connect charger at home
it's a really nice feature, we've had no issues with it.
And above that, you have
a three and a half millimeter headphone jack.
It's not at the bottom, but it is closer to the top,
but it's not as close to the top as a Surface Pro,
so it's actually a nice design.
Below the kickstand, you also have a micro SD for expansion.
You can put up to 500 gigabytes on here, although you can
probably put a terabyte if you can find the card as well.
Speaking of the kickstand, this is the exact same one
that's found on the Surface Pro, and by that
I mean that it is fully articulating, as you can see here.
It opens it closes and it goes all the way pretty much flat,
which is really good if you want to draw on this device
and that's gonna be a big factor,
because the pen on the Surface Go is really really good.
Turn to the rear of the device,
you have a eight megapixel autofocus camera.
It works very well, it even has HDR abilities.
Obviously it works better outside than indoors,
you can actually take some really nice photos.
Turn to the front of the device
and there's the main attraction, the display.
Now, some people have lamented that the bezels
are a little bit large, but they're slightly thinner
than my thumb, so when I'm actually holding this device,
it actually feels really good in the hand.
And you will hold Surface Go more than any other tablet
without compromising your grip, so I'm actually
really happy with this design, plus you do have
the two front face stereo speakers here,
etched into the glass so you need room for that.
In addition, on top here, you do have
a five megapixel front facing camera,
and you do get Windows Hello facial recognition.
You don't have Windows Hello on Surface three,
and that's a big change here, and works very well.
I've had no issue with it.
Looking at the display itself, it's a true ten inch,
1200 by 1800 resolution, that's 216 pixels per inch,
and it's a really beautiful display.
In terms of the color accuracy, we received 99 percent sRGB
with 76 percent Adobe RGB and over 430 nits of brightness
when set to max.
It's one of the most impressive Surface displays
we have seen on any of their mobile devices.
And in fact, it actually exceeds the Surface Pro,
Surface laptop and even Surface Book
in terms of color accuracy.
Taking a closer look at the keyboard, which is not included,
it's $130 extra for the Alcantara.
There is a $99 version for a non-Alcantara as well.
This is a very good keyboard, you have chiclets style.
It looks very much like the current Surface Pro's
except it is smaller.
Now you do have backlighting on this, which is really nice
and the keys have been updated to reflect the modern design,
including dedicated keys for brightness and volume,
which is really good.
Looking at the trackpad, and it is monstrous.
In fact, this is the same size trackpad as you get
with the Surface Pro.
And it's really nice because this device,
you're probably going to use for typing,
but also for navigation, and you really
want a nice trackpad, it is precision,
it supports three and four finger tap.
Really excellent, feels great, it's smooth.
I have no complaints.
I also like the fact you do have room here for your palms
to rest on, that's super important when typing.
Some bonus content here, this is the Surface mobile mouse,
it does not come with the Surface Go,
but it's a very affordable 34 dollars and it's a really
nice travel mouse compared to the Surface mouse,
not the Surface mobile mouse.
You can see it has a smaller hump and that makes it
easier to fit in your bag.
This is a standard bluetooth mouse
that's actually really nice.
This is better for people who like to lay their hand
on a device, so just their fingers versus claw users.
This mouse also comes in various colors,
to match the keyboard.
If you're looking for an affordable mouse to take with you,
the Surface mobile mouse is a good choice.
Let's talk a little bit about the Surface pen,
not included in the box either, though you can
pick one up in various colors between $89 and $99.
It's a really good pen, you can attach it to the side
with magnets, and those magnets are super strong.
I can drag the whole device, look at this it won't come off,
there it goes.
So this pen will definitely stick
with the Surface Go in your bag.
It is possible to get knocked off, but this is one
of the best magnets I've seen from them,
really elegant design.
Now in terms of features, this pen supports 4096 levels
of pressure, to put that in perspective,
the Surface three, just from three years ago,
only supported 256 levels, which goes to show you
how far we've come.
This also does support tilt, which is again
an advanced feature only Surface Pro
has supported up to this point.
Although I really enjoy using this pen,
compared to any other device, including the iPad 9.7,
this is the best pen experience I've used.
Very low latency, and it's just fun to use.
I highly recommend it.
When it comes to the internal specifications
of the Surface Go, we're talking a a Pentium 4415Y CPU,
that's fixed at 1.6 gigahertz.
Now there's a lot of questions around the perormance
of this chip, especially compared
to the Atom Cherry Trail processor
used in the original Surface three.
Well, I'm happy to tell you this is a very good processor.
Not only is it completely fanless,
it doesn't get hot either.
In fact, it maxes out about
a hundred and four degrees fahrenheit,
or 40 degrees celsius.
It also performs very well.
In fact, it gets around 2000 on Geekbench,
which is double the score of the original Atom processor
and you feel it when you're using the device,
it really doesn't have any stutter or lags.
Now I'm not saying it's like a Core i7,
but this definitely falls between the Surface Pro 4's
Core m3 device and say, the Intel Atom.
And it falls closer to the m3, so this comes
with some very good performance.
This is further accentuated by the Intel HD 615 graphics,
which again very good score, 16,000 on Geekbench,
which doubles what was found on the original Surface three.
That means you can do some video games on this.
I'm not talking about the triple A titles,
but you could do a lot of good side scroller stuff.
Minecraft plays beautifully on this.
This works especially well when connecting
the Surface Go up to an external display,
and using an Xbox wireless controller with bluetooth.
It's just a blast.
When it comes to RAM or storage, you have two options,
including four gigabytes or eight,
or 64 gigabytes and 128.
For our review here, we're using eight gigabytes
and 128 gigs of storage, and that's a true SSD,
and that SSD is really fast, and gosh it's one
of the fastest SSDs we have seen Microsoft use.
We're talking 1100 megabites per second for read,
and over 500 megabytes per second for write.
That's a tenfold increase at read speeds,
compared to the Surface three, which was so slow.
You combine that really fast SSD
with those really good graphics and the performance
of the Pentium, which does not throttle either.
We maxed it out at a hundred percent using Intel XTU
for 20 minutes, and it stayed at 1.6 gigahertz
the entire time.
You get a really good experience here, both for mobile,
from playing games, media and what else you wanna do.
Now this isn't a super powerful device,
but its much more powerful and enjoyable
than with the Surface three was.
Now we're coming to battery life.
Microsoft is citing nine hours.
Usually when you hear those numbers,
you can chop off a couple to maybe five or six.
I'm actually happy to report I'm getting
around seven or eight hours at least, out of this device.
Some of that will depend on that screen brightness,
don't forget this thing can go very bright outdoors.
But if you keep it around midrange, yeah you can easily
get eight hours on this device.
Part of the reason for that is because this processor
doesn't have turbo boost.
It just runs at 1.6 gigahertz.
That means it's very consistent in how it performs.
One other noticeable change that a lot of Surface fans
will appreciate, is that Microsoft is not using
the Marvel Avastar wifi chip anymore.
They're using Qualcomm Atheros for the first time,
performance has been very good, I don't have any complaints.
A lot of people didn't like that Marvel chip,
so it's nice to see Microsoft
swap it out for the Surface Go.
Okay, so let's bring it all in.
The Surface Go has actually been a very good experience.
I didn't have really high expectations for this device,
or rather, I knew it was gonna be sort of a budget surface
and after having used the Surface three, you know
I didn't really expect performance to be all that good.
That Pentium processor is actually pretty solid.
Now it is a seventh generation processor,
but that's because there's no eighth generation version
out there, so Microsoft really has no choice here to use it.
But that storage solution is really good.
Now we didn't get to test the 64 gigabyte version,
although we will be getting that in soon to look at as well.
The 64 gig one is a little bit slower in storage.
We'll test it out to see just how slow it is,
whether it actually affect performance.
But if you get the eight gig 128 gig storage option,
that's probably the best one, you're going to have
a very good experience.
Other things though, on this device are pretty much perfect.
The audio is very good.
You have a really nice display, in fact it's one of the
best displays we've seen on a Surface
in terms of color accuracy and brightness.
The keyboard, let's talk about that.
So it is a small keyboard, and there's no way around that.
This is a ten inch device.
It is super tiny, it makes you wanna
carry it around with you wherever you go,
and that's the plus side of it.
The keyboard is small, so how's typing on it?
I actually did not mind, again I had low expectations here.
They did a very good design here on the keyboard.
Yes, I go to what's called T-Rex mode, where you have
to bring in your arms like this.
When you're at a desk though, it actually types very well.
And that's kind of the point here with the Surface Go
is It allows you to bang out an email or
surf the internet or go on to Facebook and use that keyboard
whenever, wherever, and in that sense it totally works.
The trackpad is also good, the kickstand is really nice.
I also enjoy using this device in portrait mode.
And for those wondering, yes Windows Hello works
in portrait mode, so you can hold this in your hand,
turn it on sideways and it will recognize you.
Little tip though, you wanna use the Windows Hello feature
to improve recognition.
Try it all different angles, and it'll get better over time.
You can do this inside, outside, at nighttime.
At different angles with the Surface Go,
and that will work much better.
Let's talk about that type C port, so it's USB 3.1,
that means you can use it to charge the device,
display out, and data.
For charging, you can plug in pretty much any type C charger
it doesn't need to be 24 watt.
I plugged in 45, 65 and even 100 watt,
and it charged my device just fine.
You also plug in external display, it's like
this Dell display I used in this review, it's a type C one,
plug in and it worked beautifully.
You can also plug in HUDs or use a portable battery.
Yes, that will work too, so you can
charge your Surface Go on the go.
There's no Thunderbolt three support here
and that's not really a big surprise, but in terms
of accessories and peripherals, the Surface Go
handled everything just fine.
Finally, let's talk about pricing, who this is for.
So the Surface Go starts at $399 you still need
to buy the keyboard and optionally buy the pen,
so that does bump up the price, although it is competitive
with the iPad 9.7 inch, but it is still a little bit
more expensive than that device.
This device however, is a full PC.
And it's not as good of a tablet as an iPad,
but it can do much more than an iPad.
If you wanna see more on that, we do do a comparison
between this and the iPad 9.7, so check that out.
Now the version you actually want costs $550,
plus you still need that keyboard, so it does
get a little expensive.
But in terms of value, this is a really solid option.
This is one of the best Surfaces I've ever seen.
I'm really impressed with how, with each release,
the Microsoft team gets a little bit better at doing things.
Everything about this device is kind of perfect
from a hardware stance.
Whether or not you agree that Windows 10 is enjoyable
on 10 inches is a personal choice.
That's a separate issue
the Surface team doesn't actually control.
I don't mind it. Tablet mode it's okay,
but it works really well as a PC.
As to who will benefit from this device,
any student out there would really enjoy using this.
It's easy, fits in your bag, it gets all day battery life,
the performance is good, so for students this is amazing.
I really like that pen.
Pen just works better on a smaller device like this.
I find myself using it more, even though my handwriting
is still pretty awful.
Business people would also enjoy it.
We talked about this here often at Windows central,
this works well in meetings.
If you need to go to a meeting for a couple hours,
take this with you, it's great at note-taking,
looking up things quickly.
It's not big, it's not small, it gets the job done.
Also, for those who want a secondary device
and can afford it, this does work well
for on the couch or just at home, if you wanna watch movies
or you have kids and you want them to use it,
the Surface Go is a pretty solid choice.
And that may seem counterintuitive and expensive,
but don't forget, a lot of people buy Macbook laptops
and then have an iPad as a secondary device.
Well, think of it as that as this here,
except this is more powerful as a PC.
Overall, I really like the Surface Go.
Now it's a small device and I'm not sure
I'm gonna switch it with my main computer.
Some of you can, I still need something
a little bit larger, but again, Microsoft exceeded
my expectations with this device.
The battery life is solid, the performance is good.
That's really the main questions we had to answer
with it, and in that sense it gets an A+ in my opinion.
And the other good thing about this release is,
Microsoft is sending it to 35 countries by October,
25 by the end of August, 2017.
That means if you actually really want the Surface Go,
well you can probably pick one up yourself.
All right so that wraps it up for the Surface Go review.
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make sure you hit that subscribe button.
So we'll be doing a lot more video content
in the coming weeks and months on this device,
including comparing it to the iPad 9.7
and the original Surface three, so you wanna check that out.
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