I’ve been an avid iPad user for 30 months and counting. I still love and use my Pad a lot, but I also bought a new Surface RT. Will my Surface ever completely replace my iPad? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out. This blog series is aimed at comparing the two devices in all sorts of situations, from work to home, and analyzing the pros and cons of each. You can read other entries in the series using the links below.

• From iPad to Surface – Day 1: Acquisition & Setup
• Bonus Post: You Want to Buy a Surface, but What is Windows RT?
• Bonus Post: Developing Apps for Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8

No Internet Access

I live in New Jersey and just like 2 million other folks here, we lost power at home around 7PM last night because of hurricane Sandy. I knew this was going to happen sooner or later, so I was ready. I had charged all my laptops, tablets and phone fully, as well as my AT&T 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot. I even have this 120V AC outlet built-in my car so I figured I could easily recharge stuff if I needed to. And I did. I can’t use it to run my refrigerator, but I can keep my Lumia, Surface, iPad and hotspot alive.

The problem is, well, AT&T kinda sucks. My hotspot has been pretty useless, and so has my Windows Phone since they are both tied to AT&T, and despite getting a few bars of signal and various data connection status, from “4G” to “E” (Edge) or even “G” (GPRS… *shudder*), my actual data connection worked less than 5% of the time. I’m not even sure how I’ll upload this post. I’ll probably have to drive around the neighborhood until I find a “safe” AT&T spot, park my car, and upload via my hotspot.

Given my power and connectivity woes, I figured that for today’s topic I could talk about using my Surface when completely offline.

Using the Surface Offline

The main problem is that since I just bought the Surface 2 days ago, I was not completely done setting up all my apps. This means that many of my apps did not have any offline content synchronized yet, including Kindle, Zinio, or ComiXology. There goes most of my reading material. Zinio is one of my favorite iPad apps. I’ve been a Zinio subscriber for over 7 years and I maintain over 12 regular digital magazine subscriptions, so there’s always something to read. I also have dozens of Kindle books. I’ll have to review those apps later once I’ve set them up properly.

I have several news apps on which I managed to get some content last night while tracking Sandy, like USA Today and NBC News, but I had no content sync’d for The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, CTV News or the Wall street Journal. Besides, once the news are more than 12 hours old, especially when dealing with a live crisis like a Frankenstorm, stale news are hardly interesting to pass the time on my new Surface.

I do have to comment on the USA Today app though. It looks nice, it has a nice Microsoft Style (i.e. Metro) layout, but it lacks customization. For example, after the Top News section (i.e. front page type content), you can scroll horizontally to reach other sections. USA Today decided that the Sports section would come next. I want to change this order. Unlike most males in America, I couldn’t care less for the football or baseball news, and I would only be interested if the US Open was on (either golf or tennis). Secondly, the USA Today app cannot be used in portrait mode. you’ll hear me talk about portrait mode a LOT because this is how I almost use my iPad when I’m sitting on a couch, in a place or in bed, for email, reading, tweeting and such.

The NBC News app has the same problem with landscape only but it does allow a certain degree of customization. The Bing News app does support landscape mode and is partially customizable too. Still, in the end, I really miss a CNN Windows Store app. Judge me all you want, CNN remains my favorite news source.

News Reading: Advantage iPad

Blogging

Upon deciding today’s topic, my first thought was “It’d be cool to write the blog post on the Surface itself”. And why not? It gives much better battery life than a laptop, and that would be pretty cool to in terms of putting the Surfaces through its paces. The problem is like a lot of bloggers out there, I’m hooked on Windows Live Writer. Once you use Live Writer, anything else feels inferior. The thing is there is no Live Writer Windows Store app, nor is there an iOS version either, so both devices fail in that area.

I’ve written blog posts on planes before using my iPad and a Logitech Keyboard Cover. I would use OneNote on the iPad since it would automatically sync with my laptop via SkyDrive, which I love. OneNote on iPad is ok, but the formatting options are very limited. I would type all the raw text on the plane, and then copy the text to Live Writer on my laptop later, to finish polishing up the blog post. I’m sure some people will tell me there are good blog writer apps out there in the Apple App Store. If there are, and they are compatible with Community Server, let me know.

In the end, I used whatever juice I had left in my Windows 8 Lenovo laptop and I wrote this blog post using Live Writer.

Blogging: Tie (both iPad and Surface fail)

Document Editing

Another alternative is to use a Word Processor, and then copy/paste the text to a blog editor for final polish & upload. I find Pages on the iPad to be a joke compared to Microsoft Word. It’s basically just a glorified Notepad with some formatting thrown in. The Surface gives me a FULL version of Microsoft Word 2013 for Windows RT. Not a watered down version, not a subset, the full Monty. In fact, having access to Office on the Surface has already paid off since it’s allowed me to easily work with some work documents that have been emailed to me. The Surface wins hands down here since I get the full Office experience and I know my document formatting won’t get messed up in the conversion to Pages, Numbers or Keynote.

Furthermore, getting documents in an out of the Surface is so easy. I can download docs from email or a SharePoint site straight to My Documents, just like on any Windows machine. I can also use the built-in SkyDrive integration to easily sync documents across PCs, laptops and tablets. Lastly, another option is to simply stick a USB key or microSD card in the Surface and get my documents from there, moving them in and out. Having this common document repository to save files really makes things easier.

On the iPad, moving files in and out is a nightmare since there is no “common repository”. All apps are isolated in silos. Many use Dropbox to sync files across computers and tablets, but each app then needs to integrate with Dropbox, and you’ll soon end up with multiple copies of your documents since they cannot access any shared storage.

Document Transfer & Editing: Advantage Surface

Battery Life

I have not really challenged the battery life on my Surface to really provide a quantifiable analysis. On the iPad, the battery life is excellent. Even as a power user I can use it for one or more days without any worry. So far I’m very satisfied with the Surface battery life but you really shouldn’t draw any conclusions from that.

Battery Life: iPad is excellent, too early to comment on Surface

Day 2 Summary

It’s been a struggle to play with the Surface without Internet access. I really need to setup more apps and download more offline content to properly evaluate its use during a power outage, or more commonly, on a plane during a long trip. I still managed to put my Surface to good use while offline, especially when it comes to productivity work with Microsoft Office, and since Hurricane Sandy didn’t stop me from playing Angry Birds Space.

I’m sure I’ll discover more insights about using the Surface offline over the next few weeks and months, both good and bad, and I’ll try to share them here.

If you have any questions about Surface, including suggestions for future topics to explore in this series, questions about my experiences with the Surface vs. iPad, or any other tablet, feel free to ask them in the comments section below, or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the right tools for you with the new NetAdvantage for Windows UI. You should also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are someof the key apps you want to see on Surface? When working offline on a tablet, what matters most to you?

See you tomorrow! (cross your fingers that I’ll get my power back)