Time for change

New computer

Has been time for me to refresh my computer for a while so last week I finally got my preordered Surface Pro 4.

After more than a decade with OSX I thought that Windows deserved a chance with their promissing Windows 10 release. Have been running windows occationally on the Mac also both dual boot and with Parallells/VMware Fusion but the experience was never great with limiting performance or the hassle of having to reboot the computer and then not having all the other tools while running Windows.

I started to look at the Surface line already with the Surface Pro 3 and found it to be a tempting concept, and when they released the Surface Pro 4 I couldn't find any reason to stick with a traditional laptop. I'm a developer and my main work is done either at home or at the office but I also do quite alot of traveling and work at clients locations all over the world.

I got the The Surface Pro I7 with 16GB of ram to ensure it could keep up with my work, and it clearly is a quick and capable machine, I also got the dock to support my dual screen setup in my home office including a 4K Samsung screen doubling as a monitor. The single Surface connect cable is a great idea but I found the connection from the dock to be a bit sensitive, so I quickly learned not to move around the computer while it was docked.

Since my primary usage of the computer is while docked with at least one secondary screen and a real keyboard and mouse I didn't bother with getting the type cover, I might just as well bring a real keyboard for me while I'm traveling and use the on screen keyboard in between.

Hardware and performance wise it shouldn't really be anything to complain about... I thought it was a good time to jump over to Windows now that it had matured and with Windows 10 finally felt like it didn't try to be two different OS at once, but one coherent experience.

4th generation still have child issues...

If you followed the news on Surface Pro 4 you might have read about glitching screens and there was an update available before I received my computer so I was kind of relieved that I shouldn't have to deal with child diseases but it seams like I was mistaken. Below is a summary of the issues I'm currently having with the computer (with all the available updates installed as of 17th of December 2015).

Sleep and keep sleeping

This was the first issue I experiences and basically meant that the computer didn't come back from sleep at all, hard power off and power on was required to get the computer back which obviously meant that all open program and windows would be closed and any unsaved documents lost. I changed the setting to disable the sleep mode and after recommendation from the support I have also disabled Hyper-V. It's been a while since I had the issue now but still don't trust it to be gone.

Freeze instead of BSOD?

I never enjoyed the BSOD (blue screen of death) that plagued Windows in the past, but now I have experiences something even worse, the total freeze of the system, first time was during lunch today, I thought it was because the computer tried to go to sleep but later this after noon it happen again while I was actively sitting in front of the computer and was working. I surely hope that is just an issue with my computer and that a replacement unit will solve...

Pen detection

Have had a few issues with the pen, had the button not working one and atleast once that the screen wouldn't recognize the pen at all. But over all has the pen worked okey but the remaining complaint that I have is that it doesn't register while you press the screen ever so lightly, what's the point of having 1024 pressure levels if they don't start counting until you press the screen firmly? At least for me it totally destroyed the feel that this would be anything like a normal notebook (paper thing you know). Hopefully this is just an issue with the pen itself and an easy fix...

External displays

As I mentioned I got the surface dock and are using a three screen setup at home, when it works it's great but occationally when coming back from sleep or after having any of the screens turned of they simply don't get detected correctly or at all, the TV does for instance not accept any audio any longer or one of the two screen just stays black. Unplugging the cable from the dock to the TV and back again usually solves the issue, just plugging the surface connect cable in and out does not however.

Kickstand

Let me start with saying that the kickstand is awesome and I have no issues to use it in my lap while traveling, again I don't use the touch cover which might make it easier, but without the touch cover it's really slim and you can really use this device anywhere without any issues. I do however have a small complain and it might just be my unit but in quite often is a little bit wobbly as the kickstand and the screen haven't created a perfect flat square.

On screen keyboard

Since I don't use the touch cover keyboard I have been using the touch keyboard and it hasn't been great, I think part of it is just a question of getting used to it finding myself pressing the wrong key over and over again, also took ages until I found out how to enable the full keyboard so you can use the arrow keys etc. Don't understand why that has to be a hidden feature and not enabled together with the other keyboard alternatives as default, they do actually even show the icon for selecting the keyboard but it's grayed out until you find this hidden menu which I can't remember myself now or I would have told you all about it. The other major complain I have about the on screen keyboard is in the tablet mode, while in tablet mode the keyboard is suppose to be shown while needed but this doesn't always work with normal windows apps resulting in no keyboard available, in normal windows mode there's a button to open up the keyboard when ever you want but this button doesn't exist in tablet mode leaving you to say the least a bit crippled.

Windows for developers

I'm a long time Unix fan and that was one of the main reasons I went with OSX all these years ago. I didn't however expect how much trouble it could be to setup a half decent setup in Windows. We use alot of git repos and uses Google repo to manage them all together. Repo isn't supported in windows but I was able to run it with the help of cygwin and also found a fork which could be used in windows. However regardless of what I did (and enabled proper symlinks in Cygwin) I couldn't get a setup which just worked. I could get repo to work in the command line and build all our projects with no problems but when I tried to open up the projects in Netbeans nothing worked, after trying everything I could thinkof and find on the net I finally had to abandon repo and just run git manually for all our repos as in the old dark days before repo....

Netbeans are still giving me some warnings when I add files but atleast it works now and I can't be asked to spend any more time to get it to work any better now. I assume if we where using visual studio it might have been much better but I really just wanted to setup the computer as I was used to and now afterwards I think it would have been quicker and better to set everything up in Linux, if they only would have had all the drivers for the computer...

Would I recommend it?

So the final and perhaps most important question, would I recommend this computer? 

First of all let me start with saying that this clearly is a tablet which can replace your laptop. The tablet experience might not be as polished as an iPad but you can do so much more that you forget about some of the rough edges.

Hardware wise it's a great machine and Windows hello makes me smile each time I have to unlock the computer.

So for any other company this would have been a home run, they done everything they could to perfection, but for Microsoft it's different, almost all the issues I have with the computer is software related, and for Microsoft there isn't any good excuse for why they haven't solved these. So what I would say, if you need a new computer wait until early next year when Microsoft says they should release a number of updates and hopefully we can all recommend the Surface Pro 4 for the brilliant machine of the future that it really is.

What is currently the best "smart" watch?

Introduction

Smart watches has finally got into the mainstream market but what's the benefit with these smart watches and are they really any clever?

I been wearing watches for as long as I remember and enjoy the basic functionality plus the various bonuses that various watches have provided on the wrist, I most however admit that historically you had often to be quite happy with a stopwatch, an alarm and some simple timers.

There is clearly many benefit with having a smart device directly on your wrist and the requirements and need is probably different for everyone.

Comparison

So before I get into my personal opinions and experiences I made a simple table with the basic specifications for some well known premium watches.

Watch	Pepple Steal Time	Apple Sport Watch	Garmin Fenix 3	Garmin Fenix 3 Sapphire	Apple Watch
Price	From 300 €	From 449 €	449 €	549 €	From 699 €
Screen size	1.25"	1.7"	1.2" (round)	1.2" (round)	1.7"
Size (WxHxD)	37.5x47x10.5mm	42x35.9x10.5mm	51x51x16mm	51x51x16mm	42x35.9x10.5mm
Touch screen	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Screen material	2.5D glass	Ion-X	Mineral glass	Sapphire	Sapphire
Body material	Stainless	Aluminium	Stainless	Stainless	Stainless
Water rating	30m	Water resistant	100m	100m	Water resistant
Weight	62.3g	81g	82g	85g	101g
Screen always on	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Sun readably	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Battery time	10 days	18 hours	Upto 6 weeks	Upto 6 weeks	18 hours
Apps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
iOS support	Yes	Only iPhone	Yes	Yes	Only iPhone
Android support	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Heart rate	No	Yes	Accessory	Accessory	Yes
GPS/GLONASS	No	No	Yes/Yes	Yes/Yes	No

My experience

My first real smart watch was the Samsung Gear Fit which I got when I changed over from my third iPhone to the Note 4. Since I bike almost daily I really liked the fact that I could start and stop Runkeeper from the watch instead of having to fiddle with the phone before setting off on the bike. I also enjoyed to get the notifications on the wrist and it became my daily wearer for a while with an okey battery life at about two days with some shorter bike rides. Everything was quite well and I was pleased with the watch until I got tired of waiting for Samsung to release Lollipop to the Note here in Sweden, and after trying to use their German version I finally settled for Cyanogenmod which was both a later version and didn't drain my battery in half the time. This change of OS on the phone did however come with an unexpected drawback, the Gear Fit wouldn't connect to the phone any longer, or wouldn't do it in any meaningful way.

As I mentioned I go biking quite often and started to wear my Suunto training watch more and more, it did however still require me to manually start run keeper on my phone and fiddle with everything but atleast I now could get some heart rate readings. With my hairy arms I have never been able to get a reliable (if any) reading from the optical heart rate sensors, like on the Gear Fit and Apple Watch.

In my office we got the Apple Watch a while back and my colleges each tried it for a few weeks and their consensus was that "it's not quite a nice to have" basically meaning that when they forgot to charge it in the evening the benefit of wearing the watch didn't make up for the hassle to charge it and one of my colleges stopped using it altogether and my other college changed back to his old analog watch instead as a daily watch, bear in mind that these where both technology enthusiasts just like myself.

So now to my big question, What if the best smart watch would be just an "ordinary" watch with some smart features? This was one of the reason that I took the leap and got the Garmin Fenix 3 with Sapphire glass. Given that the watch is still brand new I might miss some details but the initial experience has been great.

1) First when unpacking the watch I could start use it directly and with the assistance of GPS it got the exact time without me doing much at all. Just as a comparison when I thought I should try out the Apple Watch I first realized that it couldn't even start without being activated from the phone, and secondly that it had to be paired with an iPhone and that my iPad wouldn't work.

2) Since I like to use the watch while I'm training I have been reluctant to have a watch with touch screen since I haven't tried one which always works as expected without registering false touches, have this problem with my phone as well when it's raining but I can accept that I shouldn't use the phone in the rain but for the watch it's a requirement to handle the wet. Tactile buttons also means that I can interact with the watch without actually looking at it, great for races and other times when you're literally on the run.

3) Runkeeper, or to keep running while running... while I like runkeeper and been using it or similar apps for the past two years it has a severe impact on the battery life of the phone, so much that when I go paddling for extended periods of time I now bring a spare battery to charge my phone while I'm out. With the Fenix 3 they state 20 hours of concurrent GPS usage and if I would feel like an even longer run I would use the UltraTrak feature to get the GPS to last for upto 50 hours, all of this without requiring me to bring my phone with me whenever I like to train, or just keep the phone for emergencies and ensure it has some juice left in it.

4) Show me the time, the key feature of a watch has always been to show the current time, and regardless of how reactive a smart watch is to your wrist movement nothing can ever beat a screen which is always on, do I even need to say that I like to check the time even if the sun is shining or if I'm in a dark room without turning on a "flash light".

5) Notifications and apps, a smart watch which can't display notifications are probably not even allowed to be called a smart watch by today's standard. The question is if you need the watch to do much more or if it's not just as good to bring out the phone for more advanced interactions and communication? The Garmin watch has it's own app store just as the Pebble and the Apple watches but of cause no one will be able to compete with the share amount of apps that will become available to the Apple watch, the question we need to ask is if we really need all these apps? Got the find my car app to the Fenix watch which will save my both hassle and battery of my phone if I ever like to find back to my car easily, many other apps I'm happy to use on my phone as before.

I know that the price for the Fenix is quite hefty, but compared with the Apple Watch it's actually hard not to see it as a bargain considering what you get, this is actually a smart watch and not just an extra small screen to your phone. And with the Sapphire version you get a respectable looking watch with an included extra steel link armband, which however more than double the weight of the watch with an extra 104g. To get the Apple watch just in the same premium materials (Stainless steel and Sapphire Crystal) you have to pay an additional 150 €, and if you like to get a steel link armband that will be an additional 500 €, so for the same materials you would end up paying more than double the price for the Apple Watch.

Drawbacks

There are however of cause some drawbacks with the Fenix also, first and most noticeably, it's a big watch, but for some like myself it could be considered a good thing since I like to see my stats at a glance (even in sunlight...)

The watch run it's own software and will not benefit from the development efforts for the Apple Watch or the Android Wear platforms. If you like a training watch this might not be a big deal since the development community for Garmin is quite active to enable most types of customization from a sports perspective, but if you like to call an Uber taxi from your watch you might have to wait for quite a while. The watch has been on the market for about 6 month and I seen some complaints regarding the software from the beginning of the summer but from what I can see they been quite active in producing firmware updates and the latest update was only a few weeks ago.

Conclusion

To get the best "smart" watch for you the best thing to do might be to find the best watch for you and then see if it is "smart" enough to fulfill your smart requirements also. I still need to put this watch though it's paces but I'm confident that it will fulfill my expectations and if something isn't working as expected it seems like new firmware versions are pushed quite regularly so the watch will hopefully continue to improve over time.