To my tablet associate

Hey Jae,

I responded to your facebook comment with some more thoughts about the Surface, but I've thought of a few more things since then: 

• Some more thoughts on the software: I can't comment enough on how nice it is using Office RT. It's just great not having to pause and figure out whether I can really do something on the Surface or not when using Word RT. Instead the experience is seamless with regular office. My only gripe is that there are certain things that are not optimized for tablets on Word RT (small icons, etc)
• Wider screen: As we noted on Friday night, the Surface's screen forms a longer rectangle than the iPad, which gives it true widescreen viewing in landscape, but a really long pageview in portrait mode. I've got the feeling Microsoft just had to differentiate itself from the rest of the crowd as the iPad's size/shape strikes me as more intuitive. That said, I kind of liked viewing Word documents in portrait mode (and as I said in the last post Word RT has a nice viewing option for that.
• Laptop replacement?: Pastor Brian has been urging me to sell my laptop and get the type cover (and pocket a few extra hundred while I'm at it!). I'm going to try using the Surface on its own for awhile, and see if the desktop will fill in everything I won't be able to do with tablet. Without the type cover the surface is outstanding as a media consumption device. With the type cover this might lighten my bag by about 8 lbs.
• Ports, ports, ports!: Gotta love the full sized usb, mini hdmi, and micro sd slots...I heard with the sd slot you might have to do some jerry-rigging in terminal to get everything to show up in the default surface media viewer, but it only takes a couple of steps
• Almost forgot: Windows RT/8 have these really nice start menu apps that deliver news, videos, and other media in a really stunning fashion. It really is the next generation of news consumption

Alright, I think that's it for now. Let me know if you have any specific questions that you'd like me to answer!