The surface app is a bit short on features (more come with each release), but it allows you to configure the pen sensitivity to your liking, and configure the pen as a remote. Even when you lose 15 minutes of connectivity at either end of the flight, you still win ~30 minutes of work back in the day. Some airlines like Southwest, and the new American Airlines planes, offer WiFi from gate to gate, so you don’t even need to stop talking to the team online. Once up in the air, you flip the keyboard over and turn on the kick-stand, and work as a regular laptop. The FAA rules on this aren’t exactly clear (they state small handheld electronic devices), but I have not been asked to put the SP4 away yet.
One of the best things about the SP4 is that unlike a full laptop, you can flip the keyboard over and use it as a tablet during take-off and landing. Plus, the SP4 is well over-powered for most of my use cases, so whatever performance degradation the battery saver mode brings, doesn’t hurt me too much. If you are on a plane, you can use this and squeeze out 25% more battery with very little downside. Yay! Use Battery Saver Modeīattery saver mode seems to make the CPU a little less hungry and dims the display a little. Go to Settings -> System -> Tablet Mode and change the “When this device automatically switches tablet mode on or off” to “Don’t ask me and always switch”. Flip the keyboard over and it can turn into tablet-enhanced mode, which is great. The SP4 can be configured so it knows when you are using it as a tablet or PC. Enable Automatic Tablet ModeĪgain (see a theme here?), Microsoft didn’t enable automatic tablet mode. This isn’t as annoying as it sounds, because the SP4 wakes from hibernate in 5-10 seconds. Now, your SP4 will Hibernate instead of Sleep. Go to Start -> Settings -> System -> Power & Sleep -> Additional Power Settings -> Choose What the Power Buttons do, and change all of them to Hibernate from Sleep. Microsoft are supposedly working on a fix, but in the meantime, you can (fairly) easily disable sleep. Sleep doesn’t work right on the SP4 instead, if you put it to sleep, the battery will drain.
If you don’t want to support Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 beta testing program (irony intended), then hold off buying the SP4 for a few months. I don’t get anywhere near the claimed 9 hours, but such is life. In the latest update, battery life finally got better, up to ~6-7 hours, which is a huge improvement. It took 10+ restarts to get all the updates in, and firmware updates for the SP4 come every week that make things better. Unfortunately my SP4 came with very out of date software. You select the second icon down, which is the Cortana Notebook, and make your way through each of the settings. Select the round dot next to “Ask me anything” on the task bar and the Cortana preferences will come up. Thankfully, Microsoft made this pretty easy to configure. This means it doesn’t know who you are, or recognize your preferences.
Like Hello, Microsoft’s personal assistant, Cortana, is not properly configured out the box. Make sure you use the “Improve Recognition” button a few times to get a great picture of your face.
You go to Start -> Settings -> Accounts -> Sign-In Options and enable Windows Hello from there.
Because it’s infra-red, it works in extremely low light. This enables password-less login using a 3D thermal image of your face, and is amazing. Enable Microsoft Helloįor reasons unknown to me, the biometric login of Microsoft Hello isn’t enabled by default. Microsoft’s documentation isn’t great but I believe they can only be driven at 30Hz, not 60Hz, despite the fact that the Intel Iris graphics card in the i7 Surface Pro 4 supports 4K at 60Hz. The $188 Surface Dock is compatible with Surface Pro 3 and 4 and supports up to two 4K screens.
It also (if you set it up right, read below) allows your SP4 to switch automatically between tablet mode and PC mode. The $130 SP4 keyboard is pretty decent, and don’t bother buying the fingerprint version, it’s a waste of $30 (read below to understand why). With that in mind, here’s my list of SP4 tips. Second, the seasoned tech bloggers who write about the Surface don’t have a good understanding on how enterprise customers would use such devices. First, Microsoft didn’t set a bunch of settings which should have been done by default – or as part of the installation process. There are two things that have amazed me about using Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4.