Windows Hello works swiftly and reliably to log you in, and thanks to the bundled fast charger a 30-minute charge will boost the battery by around 35% – just about enough for half a day’s work. Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro X is a better glimpse into an ARM laptop future that has been promised for years. It offers an always-on, phone-like experience and LTE means you’ll get emails and notifications even when out of Wi-Fi range. The lapability of the Surface Pro is always a contentious point: It works great on a table or desk, but isn’t stable or comfortable used as a laptop in your lap. If you don’t find any dealbreakers when checking through your app list, then the Surface Pro X could be exactly what you’re looking for. The 13-inch Surface Pro X runs Windows 10 on Microsofts ARM-based SQ1 processor, which was co-developed with Qualcomm. So, it will really depend upon what you want or need to do that will determine if a Surface Pro X is right for you. So you might want to use Microsoft’s latest Edge browser instead of Google Chrome. This means there’s also a penalty in battery life: run exclusively older x86 Windows apps and you’ll see around seven hours of battery life instead of the circa 10-12 hours you’ll get when running apps optimised for ARM. But you will notice that traditional Windows apps aren’t as snappy as running native ARM64 apps because 32-bit x86 apps is done using an emulation mode. You’d be right to expect great performance given what the Pro X costs, but this is another sticking point.

Surface x pro review