iPad vs Surface - Over before it started
As a quick recap, after three years of purchasing iOS devices, cracks started to form in my Apple ecosystem and I sold our iPhones and replaced them with Nokia Lumia 800's. However I still had my lovely iPad, surely that wouldn't get replaced?
Ilona and I had been using the iPad 3 for nearly a year and to be honest it was and still is a lovely looking device. It's light, quick and worked well with the rest of the Apple ecosystem. The problem was that as that ecosystem was slowly being sold on ebay and so there we less for the iPad to connect to. Ilona used the iPad to surf for inspiration when designing or building cakes and I would use it to 'surf the internet' of an evening. Turns out though in the end, that that's pretty much all we used it for.
At the end of the last year, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Surface RT and after using Windows 8 for quite some time on a home machine and owning a Windows Phone, I was tempted to try it out. I put in my pre-order and decided that after a week or so of owning both an iPad and Surface RT I would decide which would go on ebay.
After a slight debacle from Redmond, I managed to get hold of my Surface RT a few days after the launch. I connected it to the network, logged in with my Microsoft ID and the familiar desktop background, colour set and login picture appeared. It sounds like such a tiny thing but it felt like someone had squeezed all of the familiarity of my desktop PC into a tablet. Over the next few hours, I installed many of the applications I already had on my desktop and duplicated my iPad apps with the same ones from Windows Store or a suitable replacements. I popped the iPad down on the living room side table and start to play more with the Surface. This big turning point that passed without any fanfare :)
Over the next few days, I would wake up in the morning and read the news on my Windows Phone or Windows 8 desktop. After sifting through the uninteresting stuff, I would then send the rest to 'Read it Better' and sync the Surface before leaving the house. While at work I would use OneNote to take notes and those would sync automatically to all my other devices. I even managed to work from my Surface for a whole day when I forgot to take my laptop power supply with me. In the evenings I would have the kickstand out and keep one eye on the Surface (Facebook etc) and the other on the TV. On other occasions the Surface would sit there scrolling through my photos from Facebook with the kickstand deployed or keeping an eye on the next train to Reading. One evening we even plugged it into the TV to watch a movie. Ilona tended to use it in a different way. While decorating cakes, she needed to surf for inspiration and would quite happily tap away one handed on the screen with the kickstand deployed. Doing the same on the iPad had previously been a two handed operation as the iPad would easily slip off the stand/cover with only the slightest bit of pressure. Then came the moment of truth.
On the weekend, Ilona needed to do her monthly accounts and send a few invoices. I was using the laptop upstairs and she was left with a tablet as the only option. We had previously tried to use the iPad to do accounts and invoices but this just didn't work. It was hard to get to our document store, document editing was quite painful and emailing it to the customer was even worse. This time Ilona grabbed the Surface, popped it down on a tray on her lap, deployed the kickstand and used the keyboard. She logged into the tablet with her Microsoft ID, opened the documents from SharePoint into Microsoft Word and Excel and used the mouse and keyboard to edit some of the invoices and update her accounts. An hour later she was finished, saved the documents and printed out some more order forms. As I have mentioned to people since, this was the time when I realised the Surface was staying and the iPad was going on ebay.
That evening, I searched for the iPad (which I realised we had not switched on since the Surface arrived), took some pictures of the and popped it on ebay. I did a factory reset, packed it away in the box and it never came out again.
Looking back and comparing our iPad and Surface usage, I notice a few important things
1) I take the Surface into work. I didn't bother doing that with the iPad much.
2) We tend to pick up the Surface several times a day. We would go days sometimes without using the iPad.
3) We tend to use the Surface for consuming and creating. We only used the iPad for consuming.
Over the next few days, several Airport Express' went on ebay followed by an Apple TV. This completed the move away from the iOS ecosystem.
"Apple has left the building!"