Customer Ratings & Reviews

I was iffy about the surface at first because it is new and almost went with a laptop, but I gave in and bought it. I have come to love this thing. I went with the 64gb because it was just enough memory for my what I will use it for (typing papers, making presentations, web-surfing, games, pictures, and videos) and it came with the attachable keyboard which is pricey when sold separately. Pros: Great for school, work, and entertainment purposes. It is light, easy to carry anywhere, and does virtually everything my laptop does. It is awesome that Microsoft office (word, excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote) is already installed, which saves me $$. I love that the Microsoft music app let's you listen to most artists and albums for free (with Wi-Fi connection). Some you have to buy but most artists I listen to are available for free. It's kind of like Pandora but rarely any ads and you choose what you want to hear. The free games are pretty cool too. Good camera and video. Windows 8 is for the most part, easy to use. It's just like using a laptop or pc, just on a smaller platform. I can plug in my wireless mouse, insert micro sd card, usb drive, headphones, and sound is similar to a laptop. Memory is great so far. Email use is awesome too. I have set up my 6 different email accounts and all are easy to use and access. For the most part, it is fast, I wouldn't go as far as to say it's lightning fast after downloading all your apps and setting everything up, but it's still pretty fast. Great for web surfing as well. Netflix is pretty cool on the surface too. Good for keeping my 4 year old entertained for short periods when busy. Apps are filtered thru Microsoft so I don't have to worry about them messing up my device. From what I was told, they also cannot get viruses like pc's and laptops do. Cons: Sometimes reacts slowly in some of the game apps where user speed needs to be fast. There are not many common apps available yet such as iTunes and certain games, as they are available for pc's and laptops, and android\apple devices. Most apps available were made for users in India and other foreign countries so that kind of sucks. Sometimes the onscreen and attached keyboard doesn't pick up the keys pressed which can be bothersome if you don't pick up on it right away. It cannot read/play certain media files, but not bothersome enough to get frustrated. I wish there were more accessories available. I had to buy an hp mini laptop sleeve because that was the only thing available that would hold and protect it while getting around. All in all, a good buy and investment so far. I would give it higher ratings in the features dept. if I could set up my iTunes and get apps or better apps for a variety of social networking sites. It is still pretty new so hopefully there will be more to come.

I bought this machine for work and play; 50/50. I love the app based and touch screen atmosphere and that's why I really wanted a good tablet. However, I needed one that I could use as a laptop too without having to use Quickoffice. So I was very happy to see the Surface get released with a regular web browser and Word, Excel, etc. Seems like perfect integration of tablet and PC. And mostly it is. Plus, the hardware itself is great! Nice, light, easy to hold, great screen, semi-o.k. speakers (but better sound with headphones). But man, the apps. They stink. Even the best designed ones leave a lot to be desired compared to their Android and Apple app equivalents. There is like no one sitting at the quality control desk there at Microsoft checking these apps. Guys, the apps you allow people to produce and upload reflect on your product. Even the apps that came pre-loaded are not the most user friendly in the world. For example, the "Music" app. Just make it easy to play some tunes without having to go through Xbox music. When I finally loaded my own music files to the machine, every time we start the shuffle it always has the same pattern. The e-mail app was easy to set up with one of my e-mail accounts but doesn't work with three of my others. The best app so far is Kindle. However, there is not an app (yet?) for Amazon's Cloud Player which I like on my other machines. Also, some of the apps are much more expensive than Android apps. That's something you may want to research too if you are a big app buyer. Also, when I first purchased the machine the Flash did not work on about three quarters of all websites. However, with each software update that seems to be getting better and better. But just be forewarned that if you are using this tablet for school or research, if you need flash for less established websites, the powers that be at MicroSoft may not have "allowed" your tablet to use the Flash. So would I buy this tablet/PC again? I don't know. Now that I know what I know about it (and I researched it extensively before I bought it but despite so these are drawbacks that have since been revealed to me after using) I would see if there are better window tablets out there.

I am a student who bought the surface to take notes on. I bought the RT because I intended on using it as a supplement to my computer, not a replacement. As it turns out, I hardly ever use my laptop anymore, and go right to my surface instead. The one thing I am bummed about is the fact there is not a good app to annotate, or take notes on, PDF documents. We are provided electronic copies of all of our coursepacks, and most my fellow classmates take notes right on their iPad or Android device with a capacitive stylus, which is what I had planned on doing as well. Unfortunately, as of right now, there is only one app that even allows you to annotate PDF documents, and it is severely lacking features to the point it is not usable. OneNote would be a great option, but for whatever reason, Microsoft disabled Draw capabilities on the RT version of the metro app, and the desktop version is too cumbersome and slow to be useful for a touch screen device and my purposes. This is my ONLY complaint. Despite not being able to use it for what I originally intended ( and I hope by the time next semester rolls around there will be an app available), I still use my surface daily for school. I pull up PowerPoint presentations to go through as I am taking notes or studying. Or for a quick search of the PDF version of the coursepack to find something on the fly. The email is great! The whole system syncs seamlessly with with my computer and Windows Phone, especially with SkyDrive. Finally, the touch cover is fantastic! I was skeptical about it but decided to try it anyway and am sure glad I did! it works better than I could have imagined!

It has a long battery life. It is extremely portable. It has greater options that other tablets because it has the ability to act like a laptop with Microsoft Office loaded on it. The keyboard is great compared to other tablet keyboards I have used. The trackpad is an especially nice feature. Added bonus: you don't need a case because the keyboard doubles as a case.

Overall excellent tablet. Great screen clarity, easy to navigate through different programs. The battery lasts a long time, and charges very quickly. The optional touch keyboard is great. I can type faster on that than a regular keyboard. The magnetic connecting keyboard and power supply is fast, convenient, and honestly, just "pretty cool"! SkyDrive is great !! I got rid of my iPad to get this. I haven't tried the Xbox feature, but if you like games, they look just like the console games. Plus you have the option to use productivity software. Cons: Windows RT is not compatible with some software (Microsoft money, and a few others). Get the O.S. you need up front, because you can not upgrade from RT to Windows 8. Windows Store needs a lot more apps. It is a bit pricey. Overall I am very happy !!

Best purchase. I am a grad school student and love the functionality of being able to do school work anywhere without the bulk of a laptop. The touch pad is good in concept but wears easily. I could not return the touchpad because it was part of a bundle with Best Buy. The sound is not the best, but since it is not the primary reason I bought it I'm OK with it.

I waited and anticipated the release of a tablet which would do more than just entertain. I have an iPad but I am not an Apple person and while it does do well in providing entertainment, it does not allow me to complete my papers and as a student this is important. So I was finally able to get the Surface and for the most part, I am pleased. However, if you are looking for complete access to things beyond the app store, I would spend the extra and get the Surface Pro which is what I should have done. I can do most everything but I cannot watch the videos that I need for school so that has to be done from my home computer. I have to say that overall, I think the Surface is a wise investment which allows for entertainment as well as function for papers, PowerPoint and other such work related features. I can see that with minor improvements, this could be the best overall tablet on the market.

For my needs this is a good laptop replacement. Plenty of memory with an additional SD card. The keyboard is comfortable to use. Would like a few more of my favorite Ipad apps, but it seems quite a few are in the works. Very happy with this purchase.

I bought this product to aid me in teaching, and it does just that! Because I have Mac products and an Android phone, I wanted to try something different; I am VERY happy with my decision. I hope as Surfaces get more popular, they will gain more compatibility with sites and attain more apps. All in all, GREAT product!!!

Since getting this surface I have found a use for it in almost every day life. I use it primarily for school and it is great to use the snap feature for having my online text book in one screen and snapping it to the notes I'm taking on the other. The touch keyboard works great. Takes a little while to get used to not pressing a mechanical key but it does the job well. The only thing that I would want to see redone is the marketplace. From what I can see there is no way to look for an app without visually looking at every category individually. This is more with windows 8 than the tablet itself but if Microsoft put in a search bar for the marketplace it would make finding things a lot faster and easier.

I purchased this tablet because it can run Microsoft office and it was competitively priced with the Ipad. I can also add 64GB with an Micro SD card which I cannot do with the Apple Ipad. To date I have been satisfied with it's performance.

This tablet has great screen and sound. Nice stand and keyboard setup. I bought it for the excel and word features, I use for business. Emailing docs to others with ease. Faults so far are the lack of cool apps that I'm use to with iPad. If we could merge both it would be the ultimate.

Better than iPad Easy to carry Good apps Love windows 8

The reason I got the surface instead of a different tablet such as the Samsung or the iPad was because it had some of the capabilities of a laptop without being a full-blown laptop, as well as maintaining some of the user-friendly capabilities of a tablet. I'm currently a medical student and so something fun with applications, but also having the paper-writing or power-point making capabilities was absolutely crucial. The deal-maker was having microsoft office already installed and it has a USB port = two things the iPad and most other tablets do not have. Also, the surface I purchased had 64G of memory (my wife's iPad has 5G of memory, and it's the newest one...), so I could load and store many power-point presentations, PDF research articles and microsoft word papers as well as many applications and not worry about running out of storage. It's also very easy to use. It comes as a "Bing friendly" tablet, which is a very easy to use and very reliable search engine.

We purchased the Surface RT for our business functions and we were very impressed with its speed and functionality. However for our needs, and especially printing in remote desktop mode, we needed some software installed that only worked on the Intel platform. BestBuy exchanged the RT for the Pro with no issues, and we simply paid the difference. We really wanted the make the RT work in our environment, but 3rd party software was our issue.

Getting used to Win 8, really like it so far! Wanted to use laptop for programming, but was disappointed that MS is stepping away from supporting JAVA based products. Other minor issue was that one of the XBox provided card games (Solitare challenge) glitched and lost all stored history for the month. Daughter was bummed.

I was impressed with what iPad users could do, but my experience with my iPod Touch showed me that Apple's operating systems were far from intuitive for a Windows user. This tablet gives me features not available on iPads without purchasing add-ons: a USB port; video port; headphone jack that can be used to attach a portable speaker; Bluetooth connectivity that I use for a mouse; built in microphone, speakers and camera; and a memory card slot that lets me add up to 128 GB of storage, essentially tripling my available storage. Windows 8 provides many features as apps, so e-mail, internet, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, music, games and many other applications are available with a touch of a tile on the Startup screen. One such app, Skydrive, connects my tablet (and my laptop) to Microsoft's cloud, on which I was provided 7GB of complimentary storage which I promptly filled with my photos. (More space can be added for an annual fee based on storage used.) Because both are served by my home WIFI connection, my tablet can connect to my laptop, so I can access and copy files from one to the other. I learned how to use all this by using the Barnes & Noble NOOK app, downloadable for free from the Store tile, to buy and download "Windows 8 for Tablets for Dummies."

I use this Surface for my home based business. It travels well, and is very user friendly. I'm continually learning more, and excited to maximize its options and use it to the full potential.

I like the ease of it, the touch key board. Battery life is good. Easy to play games on

This is a great tablet! I selected it over iPad due to the ability to use Excel and Word. It's pretty easy to figure out; easy to get around. The only downside is that there are not as many cool apps to choose from as with iPad (i.e. no Spotify), but there are still plenty to choose from. It's a great value for the price and if I had to do it all over again, I'd make the same choice.