convergent
Active Member
I have had the nSP for a few days now and wanted to exchange experiences with others here. As background, I bought a SP4 about a month before the new one was announced and returned it, so had some experience with it, but not a lot. I bought the i5/8G/256G model.
Pen - the new pen on the nSP feels much better to me than the SP4. It is very fluid and feels much more like a natural paper/pen experience. I intend to use OneNote with pen a lot, and for this purpose its improved over SP4 and the experience is great. Everyone seems to be testing for squiggly diagonal lines. I'm not seeing a problem with this. I tried about 100 lines and got a 2 to mess up... seemed like a glitch or something. But in normal use I've not had a problem with diagonal lines. So loving the new pen.
Keyboard - I don't see a big different from the old one in typing. The feel of it is kind of nice and soft when carrying it around folded up; but I think it will get dirty so time will tell. The good thing is it can easily be replaced. The one area I've had some trouble is the touchpad. It seems like its more hit or miss with me than the SP4. Not had enough experience to know if its just a bad unit, or retraining myself on it. Its not terrible, but have had a few cases that seemed like it wasn't synced with me.
Weight/Feel - It doesn't feel any lighter to me, which is not surprising. But a lot of people said it did, so wanted to share my opinion. It is more comfortable to hold in hand in tablet mode. I found that after a few minutes the SP4 was uncomfortable to hold... kind of cutting into the hands. The nSP I don't feel that way.
Speed - Seems plenty fast for what I'm doing... MS Office, Firefox, Lightroom, etc.. I'm not doing anything heavy duty. It is nice that there is no fan and is totally silent.
Heat - I have not really pushed it so far, but it seems to not get as warm as the SP4. I need to do some Lightroom rendering to verify; as that is probably the worst thing I do with it. So I don't know for sure on this yet.
Battery life - Seems like its getting much better battery life. It has a slider to emphasize battery life of performance and it seems to work fine on the most battery life setting. I have mostly had it on the one up from that though.
Windows Hello - For some reason this has been terrible. I've retrained it four times and it still fails 95% of the time. On the SP4, it was good 95% of the time. Hopefully this is just a firmware issue... I'm getting tired of using the PIN to get in.
Display - I don't see a big difference in the display from the SP4. One thing I have noticed is that there is some brightness switching that seems odd. When I'm in tablet mode and hit Start and then select all programs, the screen abruptly dims for no apparent reason. Doesn't seem like it should do that.
Ports - I'm happy with the ports the nSP has. I have no need for USB-C, and I do need DisplayPort and USB-A; so I'm not in the , no "USB-C, no way" camp.
That's all I can think of right now. I still haven't a lot of configuring and usage testing to do. I'm traveling tomorrow, so will give me a chance to try it out on a plane, in a several day meeting, etc..
Pen - the new pen on the nSP feels much better to me than the SP4. It is very fluid and feels much more like a natural paper/pen experience. I intend to use OneNote with pen a lot, and for this purpose its improved over SP4 and the experience is great. Everyone seems to be testing for squiggly diagonal lines. I'm not seeing a problem with this. I tried about 100 lines and got a 2 to mess up... seemed like a glitch or something. But in normal use I've not had a problem with diagonal lines. So loving the new pen.
Keyboard - I don't see a big different from the old one in typing. The feel of it is kind of nice and soft when carrying it around folded up; but I think it will get dirty so time will tell. The good thing is it can easily be replaced. The one area I've had some trouble is the touchpad. It seems like its more hit or miss with me than the SP4. Not had enough experience to know if its just a bad unit, or retraining myself on it. Its not terrible, but have had a few cases that seemed like it wasn't synced with me.
Weight/Feel - It doesn't feel any lighter to me, which is not surprising. But a lot of people said it did, so wanted to share my opinion. It is more comfortable to hold in hand in tablet mode. I found that after a few minutes the SP4 was uncomfortable to hold... kind of cutting into the hands. The nSP I don't feel that way.
Speed - Seems plenty fast for what I'm doing... MS Office, Firefox, Lightroom, etc.. I'm not doing anything heavy duty. It is nice that there is no fan and is totally silent.
Heat - I have not really pushed it so far, but it seems to not get as warm as the SP4. I need to do some Lightroom rendering to verify; as that is probably the worst thing I do with it. So I don't know for sure on this yet.
Battery life - Seems like its getting much better battery life. It has a slider to emphasize battery life of performance and it seems to work fine on the most battery life setting. I have mostly had it on the one up from that though.
Windows Hello - For some reason this has been terrible. I've retrained it four times and it still fails 95% of the time. On the SP4, it was good 95% of the time. Hopefully this is just a firmware issue... I'm getting tired of using the PIN to get in.
Display - I don't see a big difference in the display from the SP4. One thing I have noticed is that there is some brightness switching that seems odd. When I'm in tablet mode and hit Start and then select all programs, the screen abruptly dims for no apparent reason. Doesn't seem like it should do that.
Ports - I'm happy with the ports the nSP has. I have no need for USB-C, and I do need DisplayPort and USB-A; so I'm not in the , no "USB-C, no way" camp.
That's all I can think of right now. I still haven't a lot of configuring and usage testing to do. I'm traveling tomorrow, so will give me a chance to try it out on a plane, in a several day meeting, etc..
