[nostatic]

FedEx dropped off the Surface RT this AM and I've been messing a bit with it. We got it to test as a possible app deployment platform, and I have a colleague who lives on OneNote so I figured I'd use the opportunity to play with that as well (the web client is a bit clunky).

Setup was pretty painless. UI is interesting. Usability is...umm...interesting. One would think that since MS is either late to the party and had a chance to learn from the iPad or has been doing this for years (depending on how you view their previous tablet forays), the experience would be decent. But maybe not.

Maybe I haven't figured out the ins and outs yet, so some of this might be user error. Wouldn't be the first time. But I'm not exactly a novice device user so if I can't figure out quickly how to do something then there might be an issue.

Font sizes - not everything will scale up with a pinch zoom. And the only accessibility options are "high contrast" which changes to white text on black background, and the "make everything on your screen bigger" option isn't supported.

I have a little over a thousand people in my contacts (between work and personal). Who thought that side scrolling through that was a good idea with no quick way to get to a letter?

Pinch zoom is slow in the browser and not very smart. Double taps in iOS and Android will often zoom a section to fill the screen. Double tap in RT brings up a highlight for copy/paste. Pinch has no smart zoom, at least that I can find.

The news feed has no pinch zoom at all - either in the preview or the full story. So if you can't read 9pt text you're out of luck.

With the calendar you can't adjust how many hours you see in the window - you have to scroll to see early or late items.

Oh wait, I think I found a global text change. You have to go into the main control panel (which I only found with a sideswipe while running onenote), then you get the typical windows control panel. And to change the text from smaller (100%) to medium (125%) you have to log out to apply the changes.

Will be interesting to start getting more real world feedback on this as it hits the streets. Early reports have been mixed at best. Since I don't use windows daily I don't have a lot of baggage from that side of the street. But this is definitely a "two-tiered" system. There is the win8 (and RT) veneer, then you scratch the surface and are back to a more typical windows under the hood.

On the plus side, the keyboard cover is pretty cool and I can type ok on it.