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Comment by doorhammer | Hacker News Reader

The digital pen part is the one that keeps tempting me to check out the surface pro 2.

I'm no artist, but having a digital notebook would be really nice. I want something that really comes close to the fidelity and feel of a notebook and a pen. For instance, when I'm sketching out a design or an idea, I like to jot down the ideas, connections, etc, and move them around. I like doodling random notes during meetings, and I also think it would be nice to have that while I'm working through math books.

The Surface Pro came up when I was reading the review of it as an artistic tool written by Gabe from penny arcade. Really tempting now, as well, since I need to get a new windows machine to do some side .net work.

In your opinion, does it feel as good/natural as others have said for hand-writing notes?

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I bought one yesterday on the strength of the pen alone. It was an impulse buy and I may return it (14 day return, no-restock-fee), but it is really, really impressive and I'm digging it. It'll also let me build a touch version of my game on a system I can also build on, which is pretty handy. I wasn't looking forward to deploying to Android ten bajillion times.

Also, oh my god is OneNote wonderful with that pen. It is so good.

Mac laptop, Windows tablet, Android phone. My digital ecosystem is confused.

>> Mac laptop, Windows tablet, Android phone. My digital ecosystem is confused.

Is it though? I know a lot of pundits like to use the phrase "Post-PC", but I think of it more like "Post-OS". I am in the exact same boat as you, except that I have a Nexus 7 in addition to my Surface Pro.

Contrast that to 2010, when iOS was much more compelling at the tablet and phone level. Android, Windows Phone and Windows have pretty much caught up, and I love how all this competition has created consumer choice. I can pick the device that best suits my use case for computing, tablet and phone.

In 2010, I was all-in on OSX, iPad and iPhone. Today, just like you, I'm using three OSes. Moving data between the devices is painless. In my mind, there's really no need to go all in with a single company's ecosystem any more.

OS matters way way less than it used to (Think of the bad old days, where Macs couldn't read Windows floppies), but it can still be a pain. For example, Google Music integrates best with Android. Microsoft OneDrive is most slick on Windows. iTunes runs like crap on anything other than OSX.

You can get away with any hodgepodge mix these days if you want, but it's still more convenient to match.

>> iTunes runs like crap on anything other than OSX.

I know a lot of Mac users who would beg to differ.

I use Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive across all my devices, and I don't have many complaints at all. YMMV, of course. My use case is probably much simpler than yours.

Every time I try to overlap different sync tools, I get conflicts and wind up either losing all my data or having twenty copies of all my data.

Also, of course iTunes isn't greased lightning & a buttered dream on OSX, it's just "less awful", or so I hear.

It is still quite awful, especially if you have a large media collection.

That said, one benefit to a mostly homogenous ecosystem around apple devices, at least for me, airplay and streaming media across devices with less work (I get lazy about home it issues)

I have a Nexus 7 and a Nexus 10, too. :-P I just don't carry them around all the time. If I keep the Surface Pro, I think that'll take their place - it's not great for reading but I do most of that on my rMBP anyway.

I'm the same way. But I found that the Surface was, compared to the iPad, not as nice for tablet-y things like reading PDFs. And when I wanted to get real work done, the screen was smaller than any 13" or 15" laptop. Using it with a larger display connected was confusing because you couldn't always take advantage of the pen or move seamlessly from one screen to the next. And I missed the Mac's Terminal app -- PowerShell doesn't have tabs.

So don:'t get me wrong, I kept the surface, but my dream tablet is 13-15" with a pen that runs OneNote on Mac ;-)

Oh and for Android dev, turn off Hyper-V and install Intel HAXM to speedily use Intel simulators. That said, for testing on device, it's really fast with Android, no signing issues as with iOS, though they're easily overcome too.

Android emulators are largely junk, even the Intel ones, and they're double-junk for game development to actually take advantage of the platform's features--I need a gesture-capable touch interface to test gesture-capable touch stuff, you know?

I would like a bigger tablet, but I run all my Retina Macs at max resolution so 1920x1080 at 10" isn't really a big deal for me, you know? The biggest complaint I have is the idiotic DPI controls on Windows. They're stupid, and Photoshop is extra-bad at them.

You're boot-curious. It's normal.

I'm going to go take a look at one now and see how I like it. I doubt I'll pick one up today, but who knows. I've impulse bought worse.

I'm convinced they'd have art students lined up around the block if they had ArtRage, Painter, and Photoshop with the WinTab drivers on display. But instead they hock that "Fresh Paint" program, which isn't bad but is no ArtRage or Painter.

Not as good as pen on paper, but the closest I've ever seen. You should probably go to a store and play with one to see if it suits you. I bought my Surface after I did that.

>> Not as good as pen on paper, but the closest I've ever seen.

Agree 100%. The only catch is that the pen tracking can go a little wonky near the edges. There is, however, a fix: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2171198

If you don't need handwriting recognition (I don't personally, but it is nice to have), I've found that Stylus Labs Write to be better than the App Store's version of OneNote (http://www.styluslabs.com/). It seems to have a little less lag than OneNote for note taking also. FWIW, Write is cross platform, and I imagine it would work great on something like a Galaxy Note.

The full version of OneNote, however, is worth the cost of admission. Works fantastic with the Stylus and is way better than the Win8 App store version.

I've used a Cintiq for years, and it has the exact same issue with tracking the pen near the edges. If anything, it's worse than the Surface. So it never occurred to me that there might be a solution. Thank you for the link!

When you calibrate, you also need to make sure you hold the pen vertically. Even after the more detailed calibration, you'll get a few minor issues, but it's way better than the 8 point calibration.

Landscape vs Portrait will also cause issues, because the angle of the pen is different, and causes tracking issues. It's imperfect, but I still love how good the pen is on the Surface compared to all the tablets that don't have a Wacom digitizer.

Awesome. Yeah, I think I'm going to do just that today.

I've got an ipad, which I love for a lot of things, but even with the various pens/stylii, the writing experience is pretty bad, for me.

The one gotcha, especially if you go for a heavily discounted Surface Pro 1, is battery life when compared to the likes of an iPad. If you can deal with that, the Surface Pros are fantastic devices.

I figured that might be the case. If I got one I'd go with the Surface Pro 2, more than likely.

I also plan on keeping the iPad around. lstamour mentioned this in another post, but weight-wise, I'm assuming I'll still prefer it for reading pdf's and such. That's actually the main reason I got an iPad to begin with. I wanted to be able to read tech books, pdf's, papers, etc on something electronic and iPad beat everything else I tried.

Same here. Even just the faster processor, and the responsiveness while drawing that comes with that, makes a big difference.

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