Microsoft Surface & websites

I’ve been using Microsoft’s Surface tablet for a little while now, running the Windows RT version of the Windows 8 operating system. It’s a lovely device, and the cloud integration with Microsoft documents and applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) is great. Having a proper file system back on a tablet device is a nice feeling, giving the user back some control but with some awkward quirks. In many applications you expect to be able to work with the file system fully, but it’s limited. You can’t organise your photos effectively within the photos application, for example. The file system works particularly well with SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud.

Most things that I want to do I can do with a Surface tablet, but for some reason the browser is quirky. The full screen method of browsing and the finger swipe to go back and forward to predicted “next” pages is superb, but it still feels immature at times. (There are actually 2 versions of Internet Explorer on the Surface but let’s not get into that). The iPad and iPhone handle some of the trickier websites I use daily with aplomb. TrainingPeaks mobile, Garmin Connect, and the Sky TV Guide work beautifully on the iPad. Whether that’s because the web designers have tweaked them for the iOS Safari browser, or it’s because the iOS Safari browser has been designed to work effectively with the elements that these pages use I’m not sure. This blog runs on the 4th version of Movable Type and is due an upgrade to the 5th version, but right now I can’t access the backend to write new entries on a Surface tablet and there’s no app to help me out. There is a WordPress app, however.

Garmin Connect uses inline maps and charts which work ok on the Surface’s Explorer browser but not as intuitively or as cleanly as the iPad’s Safari. The Sky TV Guide works well on both but not perfectly in Explorer. The iPad has its own Sky app of course, that can even take control of your Sky+ box. The website doesn’t work properly at all in the Windows Phone 8 browser. The mobile version of TrainingPeaks is exactly that – a mobile device dedicated version that lets users access their calendars to see and edit workouts, daily metrics and meals. It doesn’t work for me at all on either the Surface or Windows Phone 8 Explorer browsers. The page loads but then continually insists on refreshing making it unusable. I’ve no idea what’s going on. The funny thing is that occasionally the page loads properly but I don’t know what caused it to work and have given up trying to use it. And that’s a mobile device dedicated web page.

If you’re thinking about buying the Microsoft mobile devices beware of potential problems with web sites you need to access. The vast majority of websites are fine but some are very quirky. Right now these systems still feel a little immature and I really hope that with time they grow and improve. That’s likely to require a combined approach by Microsoft and web developers (we’ve had certain annoying considerations before with various versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers that we got used to as developers, and these days we often tend to develop new websites taking different screen sizes into consideration for computer, tablet and smartphone use) but it’s unlikely that developers will target Surface and Windows Phone 8 platforms if the user base remains small, particularly if developers are unable to test their sites on these devices themselves.