Xara & Microsoft Surface Book

[Fred vanderZee]

I bought the Surface Pro 3 second hand including the keyboard cover and a bluetooth mouse for € 900. I use it for both sketching and drawing the final images. Works like a dream in both tablet and laptop mode.

[ss-kalm]

Just to clarify this here ... We're not talking about the SURFACE PRO, we're talking about the SURFACE BOOK, although to be fair they probably aren't all that different. If I was going to go with BIG money though, I'd be looking at the SURFACE STUDIO, which IS an entirely different animal. I'd like to see how Xara runs on that!

[Biggy Rat]

Wow! I've not seen that Surface Studio before. Probably not on sale here yet.

Think I prefer a hand held device but that does look impressive.

[wizard509]

I just looked into the Surface Studio and it really does look impressive. To bad I couldn't possibly afford one. Like Keith, I'd like to see Xara run on that.

[slavelle]

I have a Surface Book with the i5/8gb/256gb combo and with the discrete graphics. It works really well. I have Xara x365 running on that as well as my similarly equipped i5 desktop (but with 24gb) and also with an SSD (Samsung). There are a lot of things that I would rather do on the desktop, but there are some things that work really well for me on the surface. Of course, the things you need to use a pen for are great and the SurfaceBook (and Pro 4) have a much better pen than the Pro 3. The interaction with the touch screen for maneuvering the screen and zooming in and out is pretty direct and definitely assists in these functions. The system itself is very fast and works well in pretty much all ways that I expect a laptop of this caliber to.

That said, I'm an IT Pro and business owner, so this gets used for a lot more than a Xara machine for me. I primarily use Xara on my desktop system, but I can be very productive on this machine as well when I'm out or for when I'm building website code and need to split the graphics out at the Xara stage to png and jpg files.

For those saying it's too expensive, in one respect you are right - it's pretty pricy and I had to really think about justifying it, but if you are using this tool as a professional and the extra things, like the pen and touch are useful in your craft for being more productive and thus more profitable, I think it is worth it. If you don't value the things that you get with a system like this, then certainly you can find well-built laptops for less money or you could build a nice desktop with two decent monitors and have money to spare.

Does this add anything to the conversation?

[iamtheblues]

That's a useful review, slavelle. It made me delve a little deeper to see if I was over-reacting at the price tag.
I found a comprehensive review here {link} which caused me to have a rethink.
This caused me to do a little more searching, and I came up with this little beauty on {Amazon.es}...
Time for another rethink, I think.
Bob.

[MarcT]

Laptops or tablets with IPS screens are indeed expensive.