Microsoft 13" Surface Pro 8 with Type Cover(Open Box)

I'm writing this review today on my new Surface Go 2, just to test out the keypad's real usability vs normal sized keyboards, and so far, I do notice the keys are closer together than on a normal keyboard. I've used the keyboard off and on before this, but this time should be a really good test of whether the keyboard is usable on a professional level for extended typing. So far, I can honestly say that I think I'll get used to this pretty quick- the muscle memory is already starting to form for the new form factor. Since I bought this to be my everyday ultraportable that can handle all my business needs including managing all my emails from several accounts, R&D all day, basically having at least 10 tabs open all day, and remote desktop administration and everyday remote use of my heavy artillery from literally anywhere with my prepaid TMobile sim card (this feature was a deal maker for me - I cant stand esims and the greedy carrier contracts they enable) There were sooooo many reviews about this being slow. I think anyone trying to use this as a desktop replacement or as a workstation laptop or as a gaming tablet is not taking into consideration what it is they have in their hands. This is none of those three, it is clearly much thinner, smaller, lighter, and power efficient than any of those, so how it could do that and still be able to run zbrush at a high resolution or marvelous designer or any program you would obviously run on a much different type of machine with tons of ram and a gazillion cores? I use this tablet for what it's for, and I've never felt like the machine bogged down after (now) 3 days of heavy use, getting around 5 - 6 hrs battery life. Work performance wise, there's no problem for me whatsoever with 10 and usually many more tabs open in Edge (I heard that no matter what you do, do NOT install google chrome browser lol you will get poor performance from the tablet after installing it) but Edge is being streamlined to be power efficient, including sleeping tabs to conserve power. Not once during all the installing of Visual Studio while simultaneously writing a recovery disk on a 128 gb microSSd (directly accessible behind the kickstand... the level of next level this feels like when I swap microSD's like other people swap usb drives, man, I just don't think I can describe it.) With this unit, I have way more expandable space to play with in a tiny futuristic form factor - tiny sd drives in a tiny sd drive wallet instead of a bunch of clunky, big, breakable usb sticks. Typing so far is a breeze, I'm used to it already :) The brightness of the screen was a worry for me (by reading and watching reviews) until I got my unit and cranked it. I like a bright screen so I left the screen at full bright to test the battery life. I know they test it with the brightness at half, but I wanted real world results for my battery test. Also, the brightness was very sufficient for me both indoors and outdoors, I think in extreme sunlight it might be difficult to see though. With the brightness cranked all the way, doing some heavy use for the first hour and then streaming the news and leaving the unit on to go out for a while, come back and 3 hours into that, the battery is at 45%. I figured that's about right for having everything cranked including the volume the whole time. I'm gonna go ahead and say it. I wouldn't buy the basic unit if you paid me to. Why buy an inferior, probably slow unit when there is a superior, excellent performing unit at the top end which is only a couple hundo more? I usually own my devices for at least a couple years so why would I condemn myself to an inferior machine for that long? Start off on the right foot. This is the greatest unit I have ever laid my hands on for so many reasons. I already have enough power sucking multicore beasts. I needed a slim, tiny, ultraportable Windows 10 to control my other units (with remote desktop) from a jacuzzi in Atlanta or the beach right across town or even from my bed for hours iterating over renders in 3dsMax on my supercomputer from this cool unit in my hands. System administration is a breeze when you're just swiping and tapping everything like the cool kids do. Web performance - smooth scrolling 95 percent of the time. Under heavy stress(i was constantly transferring files over the network to the removable sd card at about 23 MB/s which was the one expected but off-putting downside to this unit. It conserves power by limiting the speed for wifi, so keep that in mind. my normal transfer speed from network to disk is around 58 MB/s) it opened and closed programs, and multiple tabs with no bogging down whatsoever. Ill be buying the usb-c to ethernet adapter in case I'm in a rush to transfer a lot of files, but I'm usually multitasking so one timer is just another timer to me, tbh, as long as it all gets done. So since it does everything I need it to including run Visual Studio and Blender and Fl Studio like a champ, I just know better than to hit it with my heavy work that frankly has no business being extensively produced on anything but a workhorse.. As for my business needs, this thing knocks out every administrative and dev task like the high end machine it is, period. The Go 2 unit is my goto unit mainly cause it gives me the most convenient way to manage my entire network of special purpose units and use them all from one terminal I can take anywhere.