That is high on my list! If I can get Win10 on the machine in the motorhome, I'd *love* to use the tablet as a remote *and* a remote screen. I don't know if Continuum is quite there yet, but I'm antsy to try.Originally Posted by Kchrpm
That is high on my list! If I can get Win10 on the machine in the motorhome, I'd *love* to use the tablet as a remote *and* a remote screen. I don't know if Continuum is quite there yet, but I'm antsy to try.
Venue 11 seems quite nice. It's not as fancy feeling as a Surface, but being cheaper than an SP3 and MUCH cheaper than an SP4 and being able to wrap significant Dell discount into the purchase means I can sleep soundly.
Hopefully this weekend I can pull the computer out of the motorhome and upgrade it to 10. I just need to think about what I want to do WRT to media center. It's a good interface for what we use that machine for, but I'm thinking 10 in tablet mode might do the job, especially with a wireless touchpad attached to the steering wheel! If I can do that, Continuum!!!
I am totally enamored with the VP11. The clincher was last night, when I found the registry key that controls the on screen keyboard scaling. My only complaint before that was that typing on the thing was a bear - the regular keyboard was too big and simply moving my fingers around to type resulted in slow performance. The replacement keyboard was too big, and took up 50% of the screen meaning I spent more time moving it around so I could see where I was typing than actually typing. The split keyboard was the best experience, but since I'm not a touch-typist it was a little difficult, and because it was difficult to hold the keyboard and type with thumbs. Now I have the regular keyboard scaled down to 60% (by telling Windows the display is 50% larger) and it's wonderful. Typically I just drag the small keyboard into the bottom right corner and go to town - easy to type, easy to see. So good.
The machine itself is very fast and very responsive - I've yet to bog it down in any meaningful way and boots & shutdowns are faster than an iPad, easily. Battery life is superb - I've yet to get less than six hours and typically it's 11-13 hours. If it was a smidge lighter it would be the perfect device. I just ordered a stand/cover and stylus for it - the handwriting recognition keyboard is very good, but it's awkward to write for a long time with a finger. The stylus should address that, and combined with OneNote for Office 365 it should be an overall excellent experience.
I was planning on replacing my four year old Inspiron 14 with a new laptop this year, but I am now thinking I will hold off. The VP11 might be an all-in-one device for me. Obvs not as powerful as Surface Pro, but mostly what I do is work remotely, so I don't need a lot of local processing. $400 refurb VP11 FTW.
BTW, the Surface Pro 4 keyboard with fingerprint reader logs me into Windows faster (from scanning the fingerprint) than the ipad pro does into ios. PLUS I can use it after a cold boot, whereas with ios I need to log in with my pin code first for some reason. The rest of the keyboard is also "Very very good for a laptop, and excellent for a tablet", as opposed to the SP3's keyboard, which was just "Very very good for a tablet".
Last edited by Yw-slayer; February 7th, 2016 at 07:11 AM.
I decided to put a Surface Book on credit, because I make sound financial decisions
So far, I'm pretty into it. I haven't owned a Windows machine for a few years, but I have been using them at work, so I'm not completely foreign to Windows in general. I'm getting used to 10, though, its pretty nice. One QoL improvement MS could and should do, is come to some consistency between gestures on the trackpad and the touch screen. I can three finger swipe back and forth between apps on the trackpad, but on the touch screen you have to swipe right from the edge of the left screen, launch the app switcher, choose the app. I found a plugin called 'TouchMe' () that has the ability to make custom multi touch gestures, but stops short of the switching between apps ability.
I edited photos in Lightroom and Photoshop over the weekend, the usual stuff. Performance has been relatively ok for what I push around ('only' 16mp raws). Retouching in Photoshop with the pen has been pretty cool for the most part. Used a plugin called 'Artist Pad' to apply some shortcuts to the left side of the screen, when just using the screen/pen, but decided to instead keep the SB in laptop mode and continue to use the keyboard plus pen. I imagine Artist Pad is more useful for those who illustrate for long periods of time. Pen sensitivity is ok, not as good as a Wacom graphics tablet, but a lot better than other pen drivers out there.
Using the SB in tablet mode is surprisingly enjoyable. It's light enough to hold with two hands for light reading comfortably, and can actually be balanced with one hand sometimes. It's light weight is due to limited battery capacity in the tablet portion, resulting in only 3-4 hours of tablet use (probably get 10+ hours in laptop mode). Biggest complaint about the tablet, is that the design of the vents makes it a bit uncomfortable on the hands. They should probably round some edges out in future generations, if they intend for the customer to actually use it as a tablet from time to time.
Overall I'm pretty impressed with everything. I haven't had any major errors, so I think I hopped in at a good point. My wallet hates me, but when has that ever not been the case?
Would hooking a Wacom up to it be useful for you? I guess you would lose the hand/eye feedback of actually using a stylus on the tablet.
Whoomah!
If I was going to do that, I'd have bought a cheaper laptop
Well, yeah. Just curious if that workflow is even a benefit.If I was going to do that, I'd have bought a cheaper laptop
Whoomah!
It's what I do on my desktop... You get used to either way.
On screen lets you (theoretically) be more accurate. Downside is the pen/your hand gets in the way of what you're looking at sometimes.
Separate tablet has a bit of a disconnect initially, but you get used to it like you do a mouse, but there's still a learning curve. And you don't have a pesky physical object in the way of what you're doing.
Either way, I generally demand a pen for photo retouching, I feel dumb when I try to do much with a mouse, and worse when I try to with a trackpad haha
Nice one! And at least you waited until most of the bugs had been fixed.
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