and give you a quick overview, that’s coming up next.

Inside the box we have the Surface itself, followed by a quick start guide booklet, the

Surface Pen, as well as required cabling for charging the device. Essentially all you get

is the tablet, there’s no keyboard included here as that’s considered to be an additional

accessory worth around $200 AUD which seems a bit crazy to me, it would have been nice

if this was included.

First we'll start with the specs of the Surface Pro 4. There are a few different configurations

available when ordering through the Microsoft store. I have the highest end model here,

which includes an Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD as the primary hard

drive.

The CPU is a 6th generation Intel i7-6650U @ 2.20GHz which can turbo up to 3.4GHz. This

is a dual core processor featuring 2 cores and 4 total threads with hyper-threading.

There's 16GB of DDR4 memory @ 1866MHz. For storage we have a Samsung NVMe 512GB SSD which

stores the operating system and all data. The graphics are integrated within the i7

CPU which uses Intel Iris 540 graphics which has 4K support at 60Hz for an external monitor.

The display is 12.3" with an odd resolution of 2736 x 1824 pixels with Microsoft’s PixelSense.

For network connectivity there is inbuilt WiFi which supports all current standards

including 802.11a/b/g/n and AC. Bluetooth 4.0 is also available and this is what the

Surface Pen connects with. There’s no ethernet port however you can use a USB to ethernet

adapter if required. Inside there’s also a TPM chip which I’ll be using to perform

full disk encryption with Microsoft’s Bitlocker. Microsoft claim the battery life for video

playback is around 9 hours, I’ll talk about my results later on.

There’s inbuilt stereo microphones which do an average job in voice recording, and

stereo speakers with Dolby audio which sound alright, better than I was expecting for internal

speakers.

All of this hardware is placed nicely into the silver casing which is made out of a magnesium

alloy, helping keep the Surface light and durable. The surface looks great and the build

quality feels solid and tough. Considering these powerful specs I am a little surprised

that it only weighs 786g, or 1.73 pounds. This light weight makes it very easy to transport

around, however if you have the keyboard type cover, note that the overall weight will be

a little extra. The dimensions of the Surface Pro 4 are 29.2cm in width, 20.1cm in length,

and 8.5mm in height - quite thin!

I also like that the silver casing does a good job of hiding fingerprints, with the

exception of the Microsoft logo on the back which is a mirror and is definitely subject

to fingerprint marks.

The 12.3" screen which features the 2736 x 1824 pixel panel as mentioned comes out as

267 PPI with an aspect ratio of 3:2. It's also a touch screen as you'd expect in a tablet

device, and features 10 point multi-touch. The screen can get pretty bright, and I’ve

found the viewing angles to be excellent. Even on sharp angles the screen still looks

really great. The screen is also glossy, so it’s very reflective and can be hard to

see if there’s a lot of light in the room, personally I prefer matte screens however

it still looks nice until you cover it in fingerprints, and it is a touch screen after

all so that’s only a matter of time. I also found that the accuracy of the touch screen

was very good, I had no problems there at all.

Above the display is an inbuilt 5MP camera capable of HD video, the quality was actually

pretty good, I was surprised about that as front cameras generally look pretty bad. There's

also an 8MP rear facing camera which is a bit better and is capable of recording video

at 1080p. Here is a picture taken with the front camera and back camera for comparison.

The photo from the rear camera is a higher resolution as expected and looks a bit better

in my opinion, there’s more detail and the image looks a bit sharper.

Now let's take a look at the physical features of the Surface Pro 4.

On the left we have a 3.5mm headphone jack toward the top, and there’s a groove towards

the bottom to put your fingers into to pull out the kickstand. There's also space for

the Surface Pen to attach to the side of the device as it's magnetic.

Over on the right we have the SurfaceConnect port which is used for charging the device,

a single USB 3.0 port, and a Mini DisplayPort for connecting to an external monitor. Toward

the bottom there’s another groove you can use to pull out the kickstand. Underneath

the kickstand there’s a sneaky MicroSD card slot for expandable storage. I've found that

the pen can also connect to the right, however the connection here is not as solid as it

is with the magnets on the left hand side, I suspect it’s just using the magnets designed

for the power adapter. The power adapter also snaps into place easily with the use of magnets,

and will light up to indicate charging. The cable easily comes out should someone trip

over it by accident.

On the top we have physical power and volume buttons which are nice and clicky. Around

the top as well as the upper half of the left and right sides we also have vents for airflow.

On the bottom we have the connector for the optional type cover keyboard accessory, which

snaps into place magnetically.

The front of course features the screen and front facing camera as previously mentioned.

On the back we have the kickstand which is used for propping up the Surface, and the

Microsoft logo which is a mirror, it looks pretty cool until it gets dirty.

With all of that information in mind, how is the Surface Pro 4 to actually use?

Normal usage has been perfectly fine, I haven't experienced any lag at all within Windows

which I expected with great specs like these. During normal use, the Surface has been silent.

While I was installing a bunch of Windows updates the fans did kick in and they were

moderately noisy. The metal casing of the Surface seems to act like a heat sink, under

heavy load from my benchmarking tests I found it gradually warmed up equally all over.

The specs here are great, however with no dedicated AMD or Nvidia graphics the card

gaming options may be a little limited. With that said the Intel Iris graphics built into

the CPU perform fairly well and can even support an external 4K monitor at 60Hz. I think this

is perfectly acceptable, the Surface is designed primarily as a tablet that can be used for

laptop like functionality and seems to be primarily aimed at the enterprise market rather

than gamers.

In terms of synthetic benchmark performance, I’ve run some basic benchmarks to give you

an idea on how the Surface Pro 4 with these specs performs. The CPU temperature rose to

50c while running the PassMark CPU benchmark, the fans were quite loud and the whole Surface

was quite hot to the touch, and I got a score of 2914.

I also ran a couple of benchmarks from the 3DMark suite, the links to the full results

can be found in the video description. The Sky Diver benchmark ended with a result of

4775, while the the Cloud Gate benchmark ended with a result of 7527. The FPS during these

tests was anywhere between 20 and 50. During the benchmarks there was some noticeable lag

and the results weren’t too great which is to be expected, however based on the results

it would appear that light gaming is definitely possible on the Surface Pro 4.

I ran Crystal Disk Mark to get an idea of the disk speeds of the Samsung NVMe SSD and

was quite surprised by the results, with 1600MB/s read speed and 594MB/s write speed this is

quite a fast SSD for a tablet, pretty impressive.

I am a little annoyed with the singular USB port, I like having lots of ports available

however I suppose that’s more of a fully fledged laptop feature, rather than for something

that is designed as a portable tablet so I can overlook this here. Additional expansion

can be achieved with an external dock however that may not be a very portable option and

would probably end up sitting in one spot.

While using the Surface on a flat desk I noticed that while touching the screen it would move

around a bit which was a little annoying, it would be nice if there was some sort of

grip or rubber feet on the base to prevent this sort of movement, though this is probably

less of an issue if you’re using the type cover keyboard.

The adjustable kickstand allows you to put the Surface on virtually any angle, it’s

quite stiff so you can place it however you like without it giving way, there are no predefined

placement settings, you can set it exactly how you want which is awesome.

Overall the Surface is a little heavy for a tablet for me, however as the specs inside

are very good I can look passed this, especially as I also have the option of using it as a

laptop as well which is very cool. It’s just a bit heavy for me to hold for an extended

period of time, if you’re after a lightweight tablet you may want to look at other options

unless you need the high specs the Surface provides. The Surface does have the advantage

of running Windows 10 Pro, so you can essentially run games and programs on it like you would

on a Windows desktop or laptop which is not something a lot of tablets would be capable

of.

When compared against the previous generation Surface Pro 3, I found that the Surface Pro

4 was actually thinner and lighter. The larger display also looks noticeably better in my

opinion.

In terms of battery life while Microsoft state that it’s rated for 9 hours of video playback,

while just browsing the Internet and watching random YouTube videos I was able to run for

around 5 hours and 20 minutes. While I don’t think this is anything to be excited about,

I think it’s adequate considering the beefy specs within my particular model.

I also wanted to note that after 1 hour into viewing YouTube videos the Surface completely

froze up on me, nothing responded at all and I had to hold the power button in to restart

the device. At this stage I am not sure what exactly the problem is, but it has not happened

again and I have all the latest updates installed via Windows update.

Finally let’s discuss the Surface Pen. The top of the Surface Pen unscrews and takes

a single AAAA battery which is included. I prefer this over Apple's method of charging

the pencil, where the pencil hangs out of the bottom of the tablet which just seems

like it’s begging to be snapped off. The Surface Pen also has a button toward the bottom

where you hold it which acts as a right click and select button.

The Surface Pen will automatically pair with the Surface via Bluetooth during setup, it

can then be used with the Surface simply by touching the point on the screen. While this

is more accurate, it felt more natural for me to just use my fingers, though a mouse

is definitely preferable for me. When the Surface is asleep you can click the top button

of the Surface Pen to open a new note, allowing you to quickly take notes and start writing

or drawing. If you double click the top button it will take a screenshot, save it, and open

it in OneNote.The Surface Pen can be secured by magnets on the left hand side when not

in use, the magnets feel quite powerful and you don’t have to worry about the Pen randomly

falling off unless bumped hard.

So in conclusion I think Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 is a more than capable tablet, the specs

in my top end model are kind of amazing, and with Windows 10 Pro I can basically do anything

I would on my desktop PC or laptop. I would like to have seen more USB ports rather than

just the one, but for a portable device I can understand the lack of expansion options.

Purely as a tablet, I found the Surface Pro 4 a little on the heavy side and it needed

two hands to properly use at all times, however it was still very usable when sitting up on

a desk with the kickstand.

I didn’t get to experience it as a laptop as the type cover keyboard is an additional

$200 AUD which seems pretty crazy to me, I really wish some sort of basic keyboard was

included in the box. The Surface Pen was fun to use but probably not something I’d use

often, as simply touching the screen with my finger or using a mouse felt preferable

and more natural. If I was more into drawing or back at uni and needed to take notes I

could see myself using that more.

If you’re after a powerful tablet that you can use as a laptop with portability in mind

and great battery life, you may want to look into a Surface Pro 4 as it would be a good

choice when combined with the keyboard type cover. I can definitely see a number of use

cases for it for a student, or at work in an office environment. If you’re a gamer

and you want to play the latest games at average or above graphics settings you may want to

look elsewhere as the integrated Iris graphics aren’t quite as good as a dedicated graphics

card.

So what did you guys think of the Surface Pro 4 from Microsoft? Be sure to let me know

down in the comments, and leave a like on the video if enjoyed it. Thanks for watching,

and don’t forget to subscribe for future videos like this one!