- \n
- Battery lasts a long, long time.<\/li>\n
- I brought a small Bluetooth keyboard (I\u2019m actually typing on it now), and although the flat keyboard is pretty cool and remarkably usable, a keyboard with keys that go up and down is just much easier to type with for long periods at a time.<\/li>\n
- As I mentioned above, everything just works. Between the office apps, IE10, apps from the marketplace, and the OS itself, I was able to stay in touch, and get some work done.<\/li>\n
- It\u2019s just cool. I used it in both keyboard, and pure tablet mode quite a bit and never had a glitch.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Lowlights<\/strong><\/p>\n
- \n
- I could be a homer and say there were no lowlights, but I\u2019m too honest for that. There are just a few things I didn\u2019t like, or missed by not using a \u201ctraditional\u201d laptop<\/li>\n
- The mail app is usable \u2013 but that\u2019s all. It seems a bit sluggish to respond (could be the fancy animations), requires that I view in reading pane, and is probably a bit harder than it should be to navigate. I suppose it\u2019s slightly better than mail on a smartphone, but I expected a bit more.<\/li>\n
- There were a few times when it would have helped if I could have accessed some files on the MS corporate network \u2013 i.e. there\u2019s no VPN feature in Surface. This is hardly a deal breaker, and I\u2019m probably a bit out of the ordinary for wanting to check out files remotely, but I thought it was worth mentioning.<\/li>\n
- This has been mentioned by others, but typing on your lap is a bit of a pain. For me, the Surface bounces as I type. I didn\u2019t have any problems with the screen angle in any position though.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The Conference<\/strong><\/p>\n
This was my first EuroStar, and I had a fantastic time. The conference begins with a day and a half of tutorials, followed by two and a half days of talks. My talk, \u201cTest Innovation for Everyone\u201d was the opening keynote. I had a good time with the talk, and received some good feedback. . If I ever give the talk again (something I rarely do), I\u2019d clean those bits up a bit. There are a few places where I could have stitched together things a bit smoother, but overall I was happy with it.<\/p>\n
Esther Gons<\/a> drew a picture of my presentation that sums up my topic pretty well.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/A7BY-kwCEAEzx4h-300x225.jpg\" "\\"Esther")
<\/a>Esther Gons Drawing of my EuroSTAR prezo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n I also met a lot of really cool people \u2013 many who I knew of from blogs or twitter, but had never met in person. I also met some folks from Skype there who all seemed pretty sharp. I would try and list the names, but there are way many to list, and honestly, if you saw the list of testing celebs I got to hang out with it would just seem like name dropping anyway.<\/p>\n
I had a great time, and hope I get a chance to see Europe and some of the great testers there soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been home for a few days from by brief trip to Amsterdam for EuroStar. As I mentioned in a previous blog post (or two), I used my Surface RT as my only device for the trip. Overall, it went quite well. I was able to accomplish most of the things I wanted to, including…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}