Annotation apps are more mature as they use their own inking. The Pro is superb at sketching, but only began to support character recognition in iOS 11. But despite a highly sophisticated pen, it's still early days on the iPad. On Surface, Microsoft is very keen indeed for you to scribble in tablet mode. One question civilians ask is whether Surface and iPad cut it for pen input. Unless you're sketching, don't bother with a pencil. But more demanding users than me will find themselves occasionally stumped. I needed to format a column in Excel to two decimal places – it's well supported but hard to find (for the record, it's in a formatting button on the Home tab).īoth Word and Excel are superb at casual document creation, and the once-creaky integration with OneDrive has improved. I guess they'll need to use pro tools then. This is surprising given that education and professionals are key markets. You can insert footnotes (at the bottom of a page), but good luck editing endnotes (citations at the end of a document). But I wonder if it's eating its own dog food. Microsoft takes great pride in the quality of its Android and iOS Office ports, and what a good citizen it is being, and how lucky we all are to have it around. Keyboard shortcuts Sorry, Microsoft: Office just isn't good enoughįor two decades Office has been the litmus test of whether a machine can cut it. Hit Command twice in any app and you'll find the apps shortcuts: "Alt-tabbing" (via Command-Tab) is plenty speedy. Keyboard shortcuts are pretty important, and they're coming along. You can pull at a tweet in Twitter and send it off to another app. You can split the screen between Photos and Files, and file them as you go. On the plus side, the new context-aware drag-and-drop support is extremely well implemented. And plenty of times it just refused to play ball. Of course it has to get in the Dock – an odd first step. To do this you pull the app from new Dock and hold it. I wanted either Slack or Twitter to share the smaller portion of the display. Invoking them is a bit more fiddly, though. How hard is that to implement in gestures, you might think. It's weird, because conceptually there's only two important things to remember: apps can be floating panes, or they can share the screen with another app. When I reviewed iOS 11 for iPad back in September, I found the new multitasking gestures weirdly counterintuitive. Being Apple, of course, there's no option to reduce the refresh rate (it's a dazzling 120hz) or lower the screen res. So it's certainly an "all-day machine" – it's just not as a power efficient as you'd expect an iPad to be – and I didn't expect to "keep an eye on the battery gauge" by mid-afternoon. I had 35 per cent battery left after a full working day. If there's one disappointment, it's that the hardware sucks surprisingly more than I expected. Text was readable when the "narrower" app was used to show a web page. But it meant apps did look crisp in split-screen mode. To be honest, 1024 x 768 – the iPad's original resolution at launch – would have sufficed for browsing, email, writing, and IM. The 2224 x 1668 display was overkill for office productivity-type work. Inside the Pro is a four-core A10X, 30 per cent faster than the A9X which launched the Pro line, and more than sufficient to blast away a desktop chip in benchmarks. The machine was super speedy – as it jolly well should be for an entry-level price of £619. Unlike a Surface keyboard cover, you can't pick the device up with the keyboard – unless you want to risk an expensive breakage. Give yourself a minute familiarising yourself with the folds. I managed this successfully perhaps half of the time. It does require dexterity unfolding and folding it correctly. And since it uses the proprietary iPad Pro port, rather than Bluetooth, you don't have to worry about charging it, or waiting for it to connect. But the key feedback, for something so thin, is quite superb, with a nice springy feel – I didn't get tired typing on it. It is not much thicker than the regular Apple cover, so you'd expect compromises in keyboard quality. (The classic line continues at around half the price – but with corners cut – like oleophobic coating.)Īpple's wraparound Smart Keyboard sets the bar impossibly high. The tablet itself is barely larger than the classic "9.7-inch" iPad, as the display bezels have been reduced. It's smaller and more convenient than any PC Ultrabook or Microsoft's classy but much more expensive Surface Pro. The hardware passes musterįor size and convenience, the iPad Pro 10.5-inch has a lot going for it. Each time I've tried to do a day's work with the device, and no cheating.
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