The hot flavour of computing this holiday season is a crossover category: the pro tablet, or the laptop that works like a tablet. This form factor was pioneered by Microsoft with Surface – which crammed a PC into a tablet with a soft detachable keyboard and stylus in 2012. A bunch of Windows hardware partners followed suit with devices of their own. This year, Apple decided to jump on board the idea with the iPad Pro, which also features a detachable keyboard with stylus.
There’s still a small percentage of tablet owners who have just a tablet and smartphone – but most also have a PC. I was curious if any of these crossover devices succeed at marrying the different needs of laptop and tablet in one device.
I tried four machines to give myself the range of PC-as-tablet experience. For the budget-minded I tried two of Asus’s new flexible devices, the 10-inch Transformer Book T100HA, above, and the 11-inch Transformer Book Flip. The T100 starts at $350 and the slightly higher-end Flip costs $450. I also took the Microsoft Surface Book for a spin. That device is almost purely aspirational; it starts at $1,949 in Canada, more than the 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop even ($1,549). I also tested Apple’s new iPad Pro.
Breaking them down
Straight away, I can tell you that unless you need just the cheapest of PC/tab solutions for basic Internet reading and not much typing, the detachable T100 keyboard is a huge drawback. Not only is it cramped with small keys, it feels super cheap, like plastic dollar-store toy cheap. That extreme lightness means the whole package is about 1.3 pounds, but because the “screen” is actually a standalone tablet with all the battery and processing parts inside, it feels unbalanced and the hinge doesn’t open very wide, limiting viewing angles. In addition, it has underwhelming hardware guts: The cheapest model has 32 gigabytes (GB) of storage and two GB or RAM. This isn’t a laptop replacement, but if all you need is a device to stream Netflix it won’t drive you crazy.
The Flip is a peppier machine, with better build quality and a keyboard that doesn’t detach, but does flip all the way around so you hold the device like a thick tablet and not a laptop. This is basically what the much more expensive Lenovo Yoga laptops do, but with bigger screens.
The Flip is a little heavy, 2.6 pounds, but at least it feels like a decent laptop and not just a tablet waiting to be freed of its peripheral. It has 64 GB of onboard storage, which is decent but not amazing, and the 1366x768 pixel screen resolution is well below the beefiest boasts of high-end laptop makers, but it was bright and has decent viewing angles. The power outlet is the newer USB C standard, so your older extra cables are unlikely to work.
‘Too many tabs’ test
I subjected it to my “too many tabs” test, opening a dozen tabs in the new Edge browser before it started to really struggle to load. The tab test isn’t definitive, but I like to get to at least 15 or more tabs before my PC becomes unusable.
It’s a bit awkward to hold on to in tablet mode, which makes some of the Windows 10 fat finger issues more frustrating.
All round, the Flip performed perfectly well for a midrange budget device. It’s not for power gamers or video editors, but the average user could get along just fine.
The Surface Book, above, is really nice. I want one. I can’t afford one, but I’d like someone to leave me one in his or her will.
You can get a Surface Book with 512 GB storage, and an Intel i7 processor with 16 GB of RAM, for an eye-watering price: $3,499. It’s a gorgeous machine though. The keyboard is great, spacious and backlit, and ranks among my favourite laptop-style keyboards. The hinge is some solid engineering, flexible but firm enough not to bounce when I used the touchscreen in laptop mode. (Though, I am freaked out about my kids pinching their little fingers on those metal folds.)
There is a software switch to transform it into tablet mode, and when it releases from the keyboard there’s a satisfyingly solid “ka-chunk” of releasing mechanisms. Unlike most detachable keyboards, this one isn’t going to fall off accidentally.
I wrote most of this article on the Surface, did a lot of my research, too, edited photos, played a lot of video, downloaded Steam games. My favourite feature was the new ability to stream Xbox One console games to any Windows 10 PC. It was a stunningly good experience on the Surface Book (once you got through the migraine inducing set-up process). There was a little bit of loss in terms of graphic sharpness (probably my crappy WiFi network) but no problems with performance. This is a race car of a tablet.
But as it turns out, its problem is not the hardware. You can get decent quality gear for very good prices or really nice gear for a lot of money, all inside Windows. No. The problem is the software. Most of the time it’s just not easy to use Windows 10 when touch is your only input – you constantly wish you had a mouse for finer controls.
How we use our tablets
That lack of touch perfection is at odds with how people use tablets.
Insights from Flurry Analytics released this year suggested that when it comes to time spent on tablet and mobile devices, games remain the big daddy: 32 per cent of our time, compared to 20 per cent on various Web browsers, 18 per cent on Facebook and about 8 per cent for each of entertainment and utility functions. Productivity, the thing Microsoft is still fundamentally better at: 2 per cent.
This may not comport with your reality. I don’t know how you live your life and everybody is different.
In my tests, Windows works great with the more hard-core PC gaming and Xbox gaming. The number one thing I like about the Windows machine I tested was the ability to play games from Steam, something that Apple should really make available on iOS if it wants to make Pro-sized tablets into a primary computing device.
Where Windows stinks is casual gaming. I tried a couple of games that totally infuriated me. Crossy Road worked pretty well, and I enjoyed that. The popular tablet game Dumb Ways to Die was broken, didn’t scale to the screen and couldn’t be used. I had trouble getting some of the other games to recognize I had put headphones in my Asus. Even the Facebook app was a little strange; among other things the default text was tiny. I had the same problem on the Surface Book, which makes me wonder if Windows 10 is optimized for really huge monitors.
These annoying problems loom all the larger when you compare them to the category leader in tablets, Apple. By comparison, Microsoft broke the $1-billion (U.S.) annual revenue mark for Surface devices for the first time in 2015, whereas Apple is headed toward sales above $20-billion.
A pro’s Pro?
Apple’s Pro, above, is just a bigger iPad (13-inches to the former top-sized 10-inch). It will be familiar in almost every other way to existing Apple users. Odds are if you’re in the market for a fancy tablet you’d buy the Apple. (There are also cheap Android tablets, but they are not really swimming in this crossover zone.)
Using the Pro after trying to do tablet stuff on Windows made me remember why Apple is the dominant software platform for mobile. Third-party developers hoping to make money go there first, by and large, and the games are very high quality with no weird bugs. I’ve been an iPhone user as my primary device for years, and my kids stole my iPad a couple years ago. They can take an iPad from lock screen to playing games and back again. They understand the icons, and they understand how to navigate (there’s a hardware “back” button, for instance on iPad, but not on any of the Windows devices tested). Not only do iPads have low barriers to entry, they have the better software experience.
Do I love writing on iPad’s soft keyboard with little travel in the keys? Not especially (same goes for the latest Surface Pro 4). Did I love the iOS multitasking feature? Not really, though it is good to be able to tweet and watch a video at the same time. Is the touch-sensitive pencil better than Microsoft’s pen? Not amazingly, according to the pro illustrators who have reviewed it online and find neither device as sensitive as their Wacom peripheral.
These elements, and the enormous 13-inch screen, is what made this iPad into a Pro. But they aren’t good enough to make me want to ditch my actual professional tools, my desktop or laptop, for serious multihour work sessions, or trade in the vastly better storage of my laptop.
Apple devices do come with the Apple premium: The 128 GB version of the Pro is $1,249 (more if you spring for the version that supports LTE wireless SIMs). Incredibly, the highest-end new iPhone 6s Plus actually costs more ($1,289). That tells you two things:
1. If you’re spending a thousand-plus dollars on Apple gear, you might consider spending it on the thing you take everywhere with you (phone) instead of the thing you only use at your desk or on the couch (or in bed, I don’t judge).
2. If the pro boosts tablet sales (and iPad sales have been dropping in recent months) you can bet those prices will go up. So buy it now while you can.
Conclusions
What it comes down to is the iPad Pro is too expensive for a secondary device, but it’s a much better tablet than the Windows machines. The Surface Book is insanely expensive for a laptop, and Windows makes a pretty crummy tablet OS. The lowest-end Asus machine is pretty much only for very light use. The middle-range Flip suffers from those Windows issues, but is a competent machine for a pretty great price.
The bottom line is you’ll get what you pay for. The best dollar value right now is the Flip, but you might be shopping for something to replace that Asus in two or three years. The iPad should last at least five or six years, but it’s expensive and remains more of a media consumption and game device than a workhorse.
I personally would be happiest with something that combined the iPad’s operating system with the comfort of a real keyboard and all of Microsoft’s professional and gaming apps. But until we get something like that, we have to make compromises based on our individual needs.