Microsoft shoots…and misses. Again.
In the end though, this is nothing more than Microsoft's tablet. And a buggy, at times broken one, at that, whose "ecosystem" feels more like a tundra. There's no Twitter or Facebook app, and the most popular 3rd party client breaks often. The Kindle app is completely unusable. There's no image editing software. A People app is supposed to give you all the social media access you'd ever need, but It's impossible to write on someone's Facebook wall through the People app, Surface's social hub; the only workaround is to load Internet Explorer. Blech. Something as simple as loading a video requires a jumbled process of USB importing, dipping in and out of the stripped-down desktop mode, opening a Video app, importing, going back into the Video app, and then playing. What.
Imagine booting up an iPad for the first time, seeing the OS X desktop exactly as it appears on a MacBook, and then finding out you cannot run any OS X software on the device. As odd as that scenario sounds, that is exactly the situation Microsoft is facing with the next-generation Windows OS…
I've been waiting a long time for somebody to produce tablets and phones that are lock, stock and barrel better than what Apple's been making since the first iPhone. Every year, somebody gets closer. Surface doesn't get close enough. The thing is, Surface is supposed to be so much more than just Microsoft's iPad alternative, the Other Tablet. It may very well be one day. It has everything it needs to be that. But today it's just another tablet. And not one you should buy.