I got a chance to play with the Microsoft Surface RT today. It has this great painting program that emulates mixing colors and brush textures really well. I didn’t see any option to adjust brush opacity, which would have been nice.

The Windows 8 Tablet OS it has running on it is buggy as hell, but promising. It doesn’t lag or anything. Navigating through the OS relies highly on it’s touch gestures, which don’t work very well. For example, in the painting program, to access the menu/ color pallet you have to swipe from the top of the screen down. Coincidently, to access with Windows multitasking menu (or whatever you’d call it) you have to do the same gesture. That always made a conflict. Hopefully these are things that could be easily fixed.

The touch cover was very responsive, but I definitely was not used to it. The physical keyboard cover worked great, and I was able to use it fast right away, but it was ugly as all hell. I would suffer through the learning curve of the touch cover just for how much better it looks.

I’ll be holding out for the Pro version. I have high hopes of running some Adobe programs on it, and maybe even drawing with the pen it comes with. Maybe by then navigating through the menus will run a lot smoother. DON’T FUCK THIS UP FOR ME, MICROSOFT.