Finally! Microsoft's second generation Pro tablet is here, the Surface Pro 2. Why are we excited? There was much we loved about Redmond's diminutive powerhouse, but battery life was abysmal, making it a less than ideal 10.6" partner on the go. The second generation Microsoft Surface Pro 2 has much better battery life thanks to the fourth generation Intel Haswell Core i5-4200U. Haswell sips power rather than guzzles, and the result is nearly doubled battery life that's averaged 7 hours for us without draconian power savings.

For those of you who are still understandably confused by the Surface lineup, the Surface Pro 2 runs full Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit and it can handle anything that a contemporary Ultrabook can do. You can install Photoshop CS or CC, Skyrim and USB drivers meant for Windows. The 1.6GHz Core i5 dual core CPU with Turbo Boost to 2.3GHz means Surface Pro 2 is a powerful laptop, though it happens to look like a tablet. The Pro 2 is available with 4 or 8 gigs of dual channel DDR3L RAM, and your choice of 64, 128, 256 and 512 gig mSATA SSD drives. The price starts at $899, and the keyboard is still an optional accessory.

Design-wise nothing has changed, and that's fine by us because the first gen Surface Pro was a unique and cool looking piece of hardware. The VaporMg metal casing, angled sides and integrated kickstand are here. The kickstand now has two positions, one good for desks and the other for laps and low tables. The fan is quieter and runs less often. Microsoft released the Touch Cover 2 and Type Cover 2 with improvements as well: both are backlit and easier to type on, particularly the Touch Cover 2 (the original Touch Cover sometimes tried our patience). Windows 8.1 Pro is pre-loaded with several improvements, including better handling of display scaling and side-by-side Metro window views.

What's the same? It still weighs 2 pounds and is 0.53" thick. The display is still full HD 1920 x 1080, and that suits us fine since 10.6" is too small for higher resolutions in desktop mode. Microsoft claims the display has a much wider color gamut, though in our tests, we wouldn't call it a huge difference. That said, it's a lovely display and it still comes with the Wacom digitizer and pen that's perfect for taking notes and doing art. You still get one USB 3.0 port, a mini DisplayPort, stereo speakers and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. The battery remains 42 Wh, and it's sealed inside. It has the same Marvell 350N WiFi 802.11n dual band wireless (sorry, no WiDi wireless display) and Bluetooth 4.0.

The design and color haven't changed from the previous model, so we won't go over that again in detail. Suffice to say this is a very well made machine with a sexy look and a durable metal casing.

Skip this if you read the section heading and said "duh", this is for our computing novices. Apart from the obvious price difference (or not since a 128 gig iPad with WiFi and 4G costs near $1,000), some folks can't tell an iPad from an Android or Windows tablet. Even more complicated is that you can buy a budget priced Intel Atom Windows 8 tablet for $500, which is the same price as the base iPad and higher end 10" Android tablets.

Though you can use Surface Pro 2 much as you would an iPad for web surfing, email and playing videos and games, it can do much more since it's a full Windows 8 PC. It has an internal fan like a PC and runs for approximately 7 hours on a charge, while the iPad and Android 10" tablets can run for 10 hours or more. It has a compact laptop style charger rather than a small wall wart charger like mobile OS tablets. It has enough computing power to run Adobe CS programs well and it can multitask since it has 4 or 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM. In comparison, a budget Windows 8 Intel Atom tablet has no fan, runs an average of 8.5 hours on a charge, comes with a wall wart charger and isn't a multi-tasking or computing genius since it has a slower CPU and only 2 gigs of RAM. The Surface Pro line is for those who need the same computing power you'd get from an Ultrabook like the Sony Vaio Flip 13, Acer Aspire S7 or the MacBook Air.

Microsoft revised both the Touch and Type covers, and the first generation keyboards and second generation are interchangeable in terms of compatibility with all Surface and Surface Pro models. The Type Cover 2 has traditional moving keys, as did the Type Cover, but the new model adds multi-level backlighting with a proximity sensor (put your hands above the keys and they light up). It switches from a hard surface trackpad with clickers to a fabric style trackpad with no mechanical buttons. Key travel is slightly deeper on the Type Cover 2 and I'd pick it over the first gen model unless you're tempted by a great clearance sale on the original Type Cover. It's available in black and colors like purple. 

The Touch Cover 2 is a huge improvement over the original Touch Cover. It's much more sensitive so you can type more naturally without working hard to activate each pressure sensitive key. This is a fabric surface keyboard (it feels something like short nap suede) and the keys have ridges around the edges for tactile feel but they don't move. The Touch Cover 2 is a few ounces lighter than the Type Cover 2, but both are quite light. Like the new Type Cover 2, the Touch Cover 2 has multi-stage backlighting and a proximity sensor. The Touch Cover 2 is actually very usable and I haven't run back to the Type Cover 2 when I need to type a few emails or enter URLs. I'd definitely buy the Touch Cover 2 rather than the original Touch Cover, even if you find the old model on clearance.

Both Touch and Type Covers function as display covers and will put the tablet to sleep when you close the cover. The keyboard covers clip onto the Surface Pro and Pro 2 using very strong magnets that don't let go even if you suspend the tablet by the keyboard (not that we recommend doing so), but it's easy to disengage with an intentional twist motion from either end where the keyboard mates with the tablet.

Microsoft now sells an accessory that connect the Touch Cover 2 and Type Cover 2 with the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 over Bluetooth just in case you'd rather have the tablet on a table and the keyboard on your lap. But for the $40 MS charges, you could also buy a larger Bluetooth keyboard. Note that the covers themselves use a mechanical connection to the tablet, not Bluetooth, so you'll need Microsoft's accessory if you want to use them over Bluetooth.

This is a small laptop-tablet hybrid with a small 10.6" screen. If you're accustomed to 10" tablets, it won't feel that foreign or tiny, but if you've been using 15" or even 13.3" laptops, you might find it hard to adjust to the smaller display. In its favor, this is a very sharp full HD 19120 x 1080 display with high pixel density (among laptops and tablets). That means text and graphics are very sharp and you'll be hard pressed to see individual pixels.

This is an IPS panel with wide viewing angles and it uses bonded Gorilla Glass to reduce reflections, though we still saw plenty of reflections on the glossy panel. Brightness is excellent at 390 nits according to our Spyder Pro colorimeter, and contrast is very good at 670:1. Despite some glare, the panel is bright enough to combat bright light and it's viewable outdoors, though you'll notice some fade.

Though Microsoft bragged about significantly improved color accuracy, that didn't translate into much improved color gamut. Sure, color tuning out of the box is very good for a laptop or tablet, but the Surface Pro 2 can't compete with the Sony Vaio Pro and Vaio Duo 13, Samsung ATIV Book 9 and Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus or the late 2013 MacBook Pro 13" with Retina display. That doesn't mean the Surface Pro 2 has poor colors--in fact it looks great when viewing photos and full HD videos with vibrant and lifelike colors. It simply won't display as wide a range of hues as the best panels on the market, which is important to graphics professionals who edit images and video for commercial use. The Surface Pro 2 covers 72% of sRGB (vs. 95% for the top competitors we listed) and 54% of Adobe RGB (vs. 75% for those same top competitors). That still compares well with the lovely Acer Aspire S7 and Acer Iconia W700, and far surpasses most laptops on the market.

If you've ever tried a capacitive stylus on an iPad or Android tablet, you know it's not a rewarding experience. There's no pressure sensitivity, the tips are fat and thus not precise, and there's no palm rejection (if you lean your hand on the screen while writing with the stylus you'll get vectoring, or random lines). The Wacom digital pen is much better because it has 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity (press hard and you'll get a fat line or paint stroke), palm rejection and the tip is accurate and precise. If you're an artist who paints or sketches, the Surface Pro 2 should be on your short list, especially since Wacom is well supported by Adobe and Corel art programs. You'll need to download Wacom's Feel It drivers from their website to get WinTab support for these programs, but ArtRage, Sketchbook Pro and MS Office including OneNote support pressure sensitivity with no need to download additional drivers. Note takers will also appreciate the digital Wacom pen for its accuracy and palm rejection.

Edge accuracy has improved over first generation Windows 8 tablets with Wacom, one area where N-Trig had the advantage. The pen tracks well at the very edges of the screen on our unit (we loaded Wacom's Feel It drivers). As with the last gen Surface Pro, the included pen clips onto the magnetic charging port for transport (unless you're charging the Surface Pro 2). It's a tablet PC pen, so pens made for other tablet PCs and even Samsung Note products work with the Surface Pro 2.

At the risk of beating the topic to death, this is an Ultrabook in tablet clothing, and that means it's a fast performer that can do anything you'd expect a laptop to do. It's quick and handles MS Office 2013, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere well. You can use it for software development and it multitasks like a champ. The base model has 4 gigs of DDR3L RAM and the mid and upper level configurations have 8 gigs of RAM. For Photoshop, Office and video playback 4 gigs of RAM really is fine. If you intend to run several heavy hitting programs at once or are worried about future proofing, then the 8 gig model is a fine choice. The mid level model is competitively priced and that nets you 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD for $1,299.

The $899 base model has 4 gigs of RAM and a 64 gig SSD, and 64 gigs is really too small since Windows, the standard Windows programs and the recovery partition eat half of that. We recommend the $999 configuration with 4 gigs of RAM and a 128 gig SSD, which matches what you get with most Ultrabooks today. Regardless of configuration, the Surface Pro 2 comes with the Intel Core i5-4200U 1.6GHz dual core CPU and Intel HD 4400 graphics. This is the latest generation Intel Haswell platform that offers modest graphics improvements over the outgoing Ivy Bridge and much better battery life. There is no i7 option, but honestly the performance gains are slim with the i7 ULT ultra-mobile 15 watt CPU family.

The Surface Pro 2 isn't easy to open for do it yourself upgrades. RAM is soldered and isn't upgradeable, while the SSD is a standard mSATA drive (sorry, not the newer and faster PCIe interface). The dual band wireless card with Bluetooth is socketed. Since opening Surface involves a heat gun to lift the display from the casing, we don't recommend you open it up. Should the tablet require service or an eventual battery replacement, we suggest you send it to Microsoft for service.

The Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet is a big deal. If you're a techie you've been following the four months of buzz around Microsoft's second computer, and it looked like the one to beat them all. In those past 4 months we've seen several other hot Windows 8 tablets that may have taken some of the luster off Surface Pro, but we still think it's an important and compelling product for road warriors who need serious computing power. This is no ARM or Intel Atom tablet, but rather a full Intel Core i5 1.7GHz machine with 4 gigs of RAM and the brains of an Ultrabook all packed in a 10.6", 2 pound package. That's currently the smallest Windows 8 tablet with an Intel Core i5 that you'll find on the market (the others like the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T and Acer Iconia W700 are about the same weight but are larger at 11.6"). And yes, it can run your Windows 7 apps as well as Windows 8 Live Tile Metro apps.

The Surface Pro looks nearly identical to the Windows RT-based Surface RT that launched in the fall of 2012. It's a little bit thicker at 0.53" and heavier at 2 pounds vs. 1.5 pounds for RT. Some ports are in different locations, but both share the vapor Mg dark metal casing, rear kickstand and compatibility with the Touch and Type covers. Surface Pro runs on the usual Ultrabook Intel Core i5-3317U 1.7GHz CPU with 4 gigs of DDR3 RAM and a 64 or 128 gig SSD. It has dual band Marvell WiFi (that means no WiDi Intel wireless display), Bluetooth 4.0 and two distinctly average 720p webcams. The price starts at $899 for the 64 gig model and $999 for the 128 gig model. What doesn't it have? There's no 3G/4G, GPS or NFC.

It's all good news in terms of quality and stylish good looks: this is a luxury piece and the Surface Pro is a captivating looking computer. To look at it is to lust for it and it could easily inspire an emotional purchase based on the product's unique and attractive design. The incredibly solid metal casing is modern, industrial and understated. It can also take quite a beating as we've seen in drop tests and anecdotal testaments about the abuse Surface RT and Pro have survived. The Corning Gorilla Glass 2 display means that you'll have to worry a bit less about a tablet's weakest point: the glass display.

The corners are angled a bit more steeply than Surface RT's and the Pro is a little bit thicker. You'll notice a very thin air gap running around the sides, and that's perimeter cooling. No ugly big vents here, and it distributes cooling so that your hands won't easily block significant sections of the ventilation system. Unlike many laptops that have cooling vents on the bottom, laying it on a couch won't give it heatstroke, though we'd let the back enjoy wide open spaces for best cooling if you're stressing the CPU and GPU. There are fans inside, but they're nearly silent when doing productivity work and they're as loud as any Ultrabook when playing demanding Windows 7 games.

The rear kickstand deploys and closes with a pleasing damped "thunk". There's a sculpted-out grab point on the left side (when the side with the screen is facing you)-- maybe leftie Bill Gates had a say in this, though it's pretty easy to grab and lift the kickstand from the bottom edge too. The kickstand is very stable in landscape orientation and in fact it's sturdy enough for portrait use, though the 16:9 elongated tablet is a bit tall and thin and thus easier to topple in portrait mode. The kickstand angle isn't adjustable and is set up to work best when Surface is on a desk rather than a low coffee table or your lap. Fortunately, viewing angles are very wide, though that can't make up for the less than perfect ergonomics when used in casual sitting positions.

Unlike Microsoft Surface RT, the microSD card slot that's compatible with SDXC 64 gig cards isn't under the kickstand where you might never notice it. It's on the tablet's side as is the single USB 3.0 port, mini DisplayPort and 3.5mm audio jack. The magnetic charging connector is on the lower right side and the connector is less fiddly to get locked in place than the RT model, but it's still not an easy locate and snap-in experience like the Touch Cover or Apple's MagSafe connector.

Much has been said about Surface Pro's tweener status. Ergonomically it's not the ideal tablet because it's a wee bit heavy at 2 pounds and it gets warm and can make noise via the fans. As a laptop, the fixed angle kickstand and non-lap friendly floppy keyboard covers make it less versatile than Ultrabooks. But it still has a place if you're looking for something that is extremely portable (this is the smallest Core i5 tablet on the market), and is comfortable for note-taking and drawing. Dock it to an HDMI, mini DisplayPort or VGA monitor and full size USB or Bluetooth keyboard and you've got a desktop workstation. It's amazingly versatile, even if it doesn't excel as either the perfect tablet or laptop for the masses. And with a lapdesk, it works fine on the lap when kicking back on the couch, which is how I'm writing this review.

The Touch Cover and Type Cover do indeed home in on the tablet and lock on with a vengeance if you get them within a quarter inch of each other; it's almost scary. And just like the commercials, the keyboard covers lock on so securely that you could grab the Surface by the keyboard and it will stay locked to the keyboard. To remove it, grab the keyboard from a side to break the magnetic hold. These are the same keyboards that are offered for Surface RT, and the neat but perhaps overpriced $120 Touch Cover is available in several vibrant colors as well as staid black. Microsoft has three limited edition touch covers with patterns on the back that sell for $130, which is the same price as the black Type Cover than has traditional moving keys and a nicely curved soft-surface wrist rest. Both Touch and Type covers have a small trackpad that's surprisingly functional.

The Touch Cover is a membrane keyboard with no moving parts. There are ridges around the keys for tactile feel and the tablet makes keyboard key click sounds when you press the keys. Believe it or not, these really help with the typing experience, and I found it easy to type decently in a day. That said, the clicking sounds aren't unpleasant but they still might annoy those around you. If you mainly write a few emails, enter URLs and type passwords, it's a perfect and slim solution to your text entry and screen protection needs. It has a soft, easy-clean surface and a felt-like back that's soft and it's very thin. But if you do lots of typing, you'll probably want to invest in the Type Cover with normal moving keys and a comfy wrist rest area. For a 10.6" keyboard, it's remarkably good. But it is still a small keyboard that makes even the HP Envy x2's 11.6" keyboard seem spacious. And unlike the luxurious Envy x2 and Lenovo laptop keyboards with damped keys, it's a bit rattly and clacky. You could forgo both keyboard covers and use a Bluetooth or USB keyboard for a more desktop-like experience since the keyboard covers are a separate purchase rather than bundled like some Surface RT SKUs. 

Surface Pro has a ClearType 10.6" display with wide viewing angles and 10 points of multi-touch. Colors are natural if a tiny bit less vivid than the Sony Vaio Duo 11 and glare is bearable thanks to the bonded glass that reduces reflections. At almost 400 nits of brightness, it's plenty bright enough for well lit indoor environments, though you may want to disable Windows 8's auto-brightness setting in Windows 8's General settings to see full brightness indoors. That said, Windows 8's auto-brightness feature works better on Surface Pro than other Core i5 Windows machines where it's much too draconian and dim.

Thanks to the 1920 x 1080 resolution on the relatively small 10.6" display, we have 208 ppi pixel density and that means sharp text that's easier on the eyes and you can watch 1080p video without scaling on the internal panel. Yes, it looks very sharp and clear, and once you get used to it, you won't want to go back to 1366 x 768 displays on lower resolution Windows tablets. Likewise, if you're accustomed to Retina iPads, this will look perfectly lovely. The tablet has a mini DisplayPort that can drive higher than 1080p monitors (that's a good thing), and you can get mini DisplayPort to HDMI or VGA adapters as well. Microsoft sells these for Surface Pro for $40 apiece, though you can find other brands for less at Fry's and Microcenter since Apple laptops use the same mini DisplayPort. Speaking of Apple, we didn't have luck with Apple's Cinema Display or their ThunderBolt display, though Dell's high resolution monitors with a DisplayPort did work.

The display is clad in Gorilla Glass 2 and has a Wacom active digitizer with digital pen. The pen is a good size and is nearly identical to the one included with the Samsung Series 7 Slate. It has an eraser (flat-topped rather than the usual rounded top that we prefer) and a side button. The button is actually magnetic so it can clip onto the magnetic charging port on the tablet's side. No, the pen doesn't require charging, it's just a way of securing the pen to the tablet since there's no silo or garage. Artists take note: the included pen's opening is just a teeny bit smaller than other Wacom pens, and that means my collection of Wacom nibs were too fat to fit in the Surface pen. The Surface nib looks to be the same diameter, but apparently the opening for the nib isn't quite as large.

Inking works fluidly and responsively, and we had great results with Microsoft Journal and OneNote 2013. Graphics apps that support the more modern Windows pen API offer up to 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity and the eraser works as an eraser. This includes Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 6, ArtRage 3.5 and Fresh Paint. But those of you who require pressure sensitivity in apps that use the older WinTab driver architecture like Photoshop and Corel Painter 12 are out of luck for now. As is almost always the case (unfortunately) the tablet doesn't ship with WinTab drivers pre-installed. Worse yet, at this point Wacom doesn't have an updated driver on their site for download. Microsoft has stated that they're working with Wacom and Adobe to get WinTab drivers out for the Surface Pro, but we don't have an ETA.

Though Surface Pro looks like a mobile OS tablet and is the same approximate size as the Surface RT, iPad and Nexus 10 Android tablet, it's every bit a full Windows 8 64 bit computer running Windows 8 Pro. Anything an Ultrabook can do, Surface Pro can do, which is quite an engineering feat given its small size and limited real estate for cooling. The tablet's back is always warm (think of a warm roll that came out of the oven not long ago) but not burning hot. Even when doing demanding tasks like HD video editing or playing 3D games, it doesn't get burning hot and the casing stays below body temperature. The display actually gets a bit warm, which you'll notice since it's a touch screen. When doing productivity tasks and playing video the fans are nearly silent. But stress it with Skyrim and Civ V and you'll hear it blowing like any laptop doing the same task.

The Microsoft Surface Pro is still an Ultrabook with Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics: it's not a gaming rig. That said, we played Civ V at 1080 resolution with low settings and the DirectX 9 Touch UI enabled and it played fine. Skyrim was good at 1366 x 768 with low settings for better than 30 fps, but native 1080p resolution was weak at 20 fps. Older games should play fine as will Windows 8 Metro games, but not Crysis 2 or the latest Call of Duty.

The 64 gig Surface ships with 30 gigs of available storage and the 128 gig has 90 gigs free (we have both models and checked available storage in Windows Explorer). That's in line with other Windows laptops equipped with the same capacity SSD drives as well as the MacBook Air. Repeat after me: this is not an iPad. Windows 8 Pro, bundled Microsoft apps like Windows Journal, Windows Media Player and Calculator take up space. So does the recovery partition at 8 gigs. You can make a recovery USB drive via Windows settings and remove the recovery partition; just don't lose that USB flash drive or overwrite it! We do recommend you get the 128 gig since you can install all sorts of huge Windows 7 programs on Surface Pro. For around 10 percent additional cost, you double your storage and that's a good deal. You can of course use SDXC microSD cards to expand storage, but remember Windows doesn't let you install programs to SD cards, but you can put everything else there.

The Surface pro has 4 gigs of DDR3 dual channel RAM, which isn't upgradable. The SSD is made by Micron and uses the standard mSATA interface, but it's a horrendous chore to open up the Surface. First you'll need a heat gun to soften the heaps of glue that secure the display to the unibody tablet casing. Then you'll have to pry off the display to get at the largely not-upgradable internals. Should the battery wear out, you'll want to send it to Microsoft for replacement rather than trying it at home.

Though we wish Microsoft had used Intel WiFi since that supports Intel's WiDi wireless display, we don't have any other complaints about the Marvell dual band WiFi 802.11b/g/n module in Surface Pro. It managed good download and upload speeds, even when it fell one bar short of our bigger laptops with Intel wireless (-6 db signal difference). Even better, since it's dual band WiFi, we could take advantage of the 5GHz band, unlike Lenovo IdeaPad tablets and Ultrabooks, to avoid interference with Bluetooth on the 2.4GHz band. That's important if you're using Bluetooth headphones or speakers when streaming video from Netflix, YouTube or Hulu.

This will be a short section: the front 720p camera is adequate for Skype video chat and it's largely the same stuff you'll find on other tablets and smartphones. The rear 720p is sad. Clearly Microsoft intended this for video chat use and not much else. While other tablet makers are rolling with 5 to 8 megapixel rear cameras, some with LED flashes; the Surface Pro takes photos and video as well as a 2007 camera phone.

No, this isn't a mobile OS tablet like Android or the iPad. This is a power hungry Intel Core i5 laptop in a tablet disguise and it guzzles. We averaged 5 hours of use in a mix of productivity tasks (MS Office 2013, drawing with ArtRage, social networking, music playback and 45 minutes of streaming video) with brightness set to a very adequate 50% and WiFi on. We managed 2.4 hours of Civ V unplugged and 4 hours of MPEG4 video playback. That's obviously comparable to a Windows 8 laptop rather than a mobile OS tablet like the Nexus 10. But then, this isn't a mobile OS tablet, is it? Standby times were better than average and the tablet goes into a deep sleep state to conserve power (it takes ~ 8 seconds to wake from deep sleep). I honestly hate having to turn my tablets on and off several times each day, and have been happy with Surface Pro's very efficient sleep mode.

The included 48 watt compact brick style charger has a USB port to charge your smartphone or tablet. The 42 W-h battery is sealed inside the tablet.

Sony's not afraid to take chances with design, and we love them for that reason. The Sony Vaio Duo 11 Windows 8 convertible slider was bold but a little complex in terms of hinge design, so Sony refined it with the Vaio Duo 13. Now they've got the Sony Vaio Flip in your choice of 3 sizes. Smart move since some folks want ultraportables while others crave a bigger display. We look at the Flip 13, a 13.3" Windows 8 64 bit convertible with Ultrabook specs that include an SSD. The 14 and 15 inch Flips come with conventional spinning hard drives, though you can order them with SSDs. If you're interested in the 15.5" model, be sure to check out our reivew of the Sony Vaio Flip 15.

The Sony Vaio Flip 13 has the cleanest and most unusual hinge design we've ever seen. The display portion's aluminum back panel has a visible split and this is where the machine does its transformation from laptop to presentation mode to tablet. It's a better design than the Lenovo Yoga 13 and Yoga 2 Pro whose keyboards face down to rest on the table or your legs in presentation and tablet modes. At 2.89 lbs. the Flip 13 is also bearable to use as a tablet. With the 4.32 lb. Flip 14 and 5.05 lb. Vaio Flip 15, you'll likely rest the Vaio on the table or your leg rather than hold it for extended periods of time.

Build quality is superb with no uneven seams, no creaks or ugly hinges. Though the display back plate is very slim, the hinge is actually very firm so there's no display bounce when you use the touch screen. Magnets hold the screen in any of 3 positions and the whole thing feels solid despite the thin ribbon cable tucked safely inside. The lid and keyboard deck are made of brushed aluminum (your choice of black or silver) and the machine looks svelte, modern and classy. The bottom is plastic, which we actually don't mind since it doesn't feel cold against the legs. Plastic doesn't get as hot as metal, so the bottom of the Vaio never gets beyond warm.

The Flip 13 is an elegant and classy looking laptop and we appreciate the more rigid and elegant looking aluminum that Sony used this time rather than their signature flexible carbon fiber. Unlike the Sony Vaio Pro 13, the Flip has very little flex and pressing the trackpad doesn't cause a sympathetic dip in the Ultrabook's underside as it does on the Pro 13 (which in all fairness is even thinner at the front edge). The sides have an interesting design: the keyboard deck extends beyond the sides. It looks interesting and provides grip points, but that small ledge might get in the way of bulkier USB accessories like 3G/4G modems. More likely, the fact that the two USB 3.0 ports are so close together will be an issue if you use both ports at once with devices that have bulky connectors.

Stereo speakers fire from the sides, and after an audio driver update from the Vaio update program, they went from meek to bold. They're loud by Sony standards (Sony laptop speakers are oddly quiet) and stereo separation is good. Bass isn't great however, so at high volumes, the speakers can sound shrill.

The Sony Vaio Flip 13 matches the Duo 13 and Vaio Pro 13 for ports: two USB 3.0, full size HDMI, 3.5mm combo audio and an SDXC/Memory Stick card slot (an SD card will not protrude from the slot). The 14 and 15 Flip models add a gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port. Sony changed the charger's tip so the Flip 13 charger isn't interchangeable with the Vaio Duo or Pro chargers. The charger is otherwise the same as with other Sony Ultrabooks: small and light with a USB port for charging your smartphone or tablet. All models have NFC, Intel N-7260 802.11n dual band WiFi (a more stable adapter than Intel's 802.11ac adapter used in the Sony Vaio Pro) and Bluetooth 4.0 + HS. There's a front 720p webcam and a surprisingly capable rear 8 megapixel camera with EXMOR sensor on the back.

The large Elan trackpad has a slightly rough texture and it worked quite well for single and multi-touch gestures. We did notice occasional cursor jumping when holding the mouse button down and dragging a finger across the trackpad to move a file or highlight text. Like most trackpads today, this is a buttonless model, which means that the buttons are concealed under a unified trackpad surface.

The keyboard has typical Ultrabook shallow travel, but tactile feel is excellent and I had no trouble typing out several reviews efficiently. The keys make enough noise to provide auditory feedback without being overly loud and key damping is good. If you're a hard-handed typist you might flex the keyboard a little bit, but I didn't have trouble with it in the least. The keyboard is backlit and is controlled by the ambient light sensor. There's no way to change backlight levels on the keyboard, and it's a fairly bright white that rings each key and illuminates the letters.

This is the same excellent Sony Triluminos IPS display with quantum dot technology found on the Duo 13. The 1920 x 1080 panel has 300 nits of brightness (you may need to disable Windows 8's auto-brightness feature to reach 300 nits), 700:1 contrast (excellent) and wide color gamut. Like the Vaio Duo 13 and Vaio Pro 13, the panel achieves 95% of sRGB and 75% of Adobe RGB, making it a good choice for graphics professionals and one of the widest color gamut displays available in a laptop. Even if you don't work with photos and video for a living, you'll appreciate the rich, saturated and vivid colors when watching movies; it really is a stunning display. Viewing angles on IPS displays are very wide, and the Flip 13 has good but not the best viewing angles we've seen on IPS displays. It does have wider viewing angles than the Duo 13, but it's not as wide as the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus (PLS) or 13" Retina MacBook Pro (IPS). In competition with the ATIV Book 9 Plus, the Sony makes up for that by reproducing yellows more accurately than the Samsung whose yellows turn mustard when the machine is unplugged from AC. But the 9 Plus fights back with an insanely high 3200 x 1600 resolution display.

All Flip models, regardless of size have at least 1920 x 1080 displays. If you get the 15" model, there's a $300 2880 x 1620 option that should look very sweet. The Flip 15 with NVIDIA GT735M dedicated graphics, pen included and the higher display resolution gets pricey though, and Sony's preconfigured model sells for $1,799. That configuration does include a Core i7-4500U 1.8GHz dual core CPU, 16 gigs of RAM and a 5400 RPM terabyte HDD with 16 gig solid state boot drive, so it's a very well appointed machine. There's a 15 Flip for $1,249 stocked at Best Buy that has the Core i7, dedicated graphics, 8 gigs of RAM and a 1920 x 1080 display.

All Flip models come with an active digitizer made by N-Trig. Sony's used N-Trig on their Duo models and the Flip works the same. One point of confusion: the pen isn't included with most SKUs, you'll have to pay $40 to get one from Sony (it's the same pen as used on the Vaio Duo 13, and it uses N-Trig DuoSense 2 technology). Generally if a tablet has an active digitizer the pen is included in the box, and I'm sure this will confuse some folks, or they might not even realize they can use a digital pen.

As ever, with N-Trig you get accurate tracking and 256 levels of pressure sensitivity. Though the pressure sensitivity doesn't compare well with Wacom's 1024 levels, this is something only artists would notice. Even then, 256 levels are enough to do advanced artwork even if I personally do prefer more levels for nuanced art work. N-Trig's pen tip tracking is better than Wacom's, especially near the edges of the screen where Wacom equipped convertibles and tablets tend to be off. You have to hold the pen closer to the display compared to Wacom, and that may be off-putting those accustomed to Wacom pen behavior since the digitizer must detect the pen before it will disable capacitive touch (also called palm rejection). N-Trig supports modern Windows Ink APIs so programs like MS Office 2013, ArtRage Studio 3.5 (bundled), Manga Studio 5 (change tablet settings to Tablet PC rather than WinTab) and Sketchbook Pro have pressure sensitivity. Adobe recently added Windows Ink support for Illustrator and Sony has released WinTab 32 big drivers for Photoshop, thus providing pressure sensitivity. Word is that Adobe will start supporting Windows Ink in 2014 for their Creative Cloud suite. When will Corel Painter and other programs that rely on WinTab follow suit? Who knows.

The Sony Vaio Flip 13 runs on 4th generation Intel Haswell ULV CPUs with Intel HD 4400 graphics. Unlike the Duo 13, there's no wildly expensive option to move to HD 5000 integrated graphics. Given the small performance difference, I'd spend my money on other things, so I won't ding the Flip 13. There is no dedicated graphics option for the 13 and 14 inch Flip models, likely due to cooling constraints. You can get the machine with 4 or 8 gigs of DDR3L 1600MHz RAM, which is soldered on board so you can't upgrade it yourself. The Flip 13 is available only with SSD drives, and you can get 128, 256 and 512 gig SATA SSDs. The SSD is socketed, so you could upgrade it yourself at a later date, but it uses the currently less common M.2 form factor that's hard to find aftermarket. The Flip 14 and 15 are available with conventional HDDs and SSD drives.

If you go with the Flip 15, you can order it with NVIDIA GeForce GT 735M with Optimus switchable dedicated graphics. That option nets you 2 gigs of VRAM and is a low-midrange solution that will boost 3D games and CAD performance though it won't have you playing Battlefield 4 at full HD and high settings.

Sony offers the Flip 13 with Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs. We recommend avoiding the Core i3 since you only save $100 and lose Turbo Boost. Our unit is the one stocked at Best Buy and it has a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5-4200U dual core CPU, 8 gigs of RAM and a 128 gig SSD ($1,199). Windows, Sony's generous software bundle (Acid Music Studio, SoundForge Audio Studio, DVD Architect and Movie Studio Platinum 12) and the recovery partition take up significant space, so our machine had 55 gigs left after installing Windows updates and MS Office 2013 Home Edition. After we upgraded to Windows 8.1 we gained almost 5 gigs of space, which has been par for the course when upgrading our Windows 8 machines to 8.1. We assume at some point Sony will start shipping the machine with 8.1 rather than 8.

This is a standard Ultrabook in terms of performance, and that means it's more than capable of MS Office work, email, full HD video playback and light gaming. You could use it for software development and some HD video editing, and Photoshop runs like a champ. It's not a gaming rig, so don't expect to play Battlefield 4 on medium or high settings. But less demanding games like Civ V at full HD with low-medium settings and WoW on low settings and 1366 x 768 resolution run fine.

Here are the two ugly items: battery life is OK but not stellar. The fan is on all the time. ALL THE TIME. From the moment you boot the machine and before the CPU has risen to a normal operating temperature, the fan is quite audible. Small machines have higher pitched fans, so it's noticeable. When the CPU is at 36C, which is well below the 100C max allowable and 45 to 50C where most Ultrabook fans come on, the fan is buzzing along. If you tax the machine a little bit and the CPU temp rises to 42C, the fan kicks in higher and louder. When editing several RAW files in Photoshop, our Flip 13 gets as loud as the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 playing Civ V at full HD resolution! In our offices, we've nicknamed our Flip 13 "Hoover", after the vacuum cleaner: it's that noticeable. Clearly Sony was overzealous with cooling and they could change the fan operation with a BIOS update. Will they do so? I don't know. Speaking of BIOS, there is no option for fan control. Your only option is selecting silent mode in Vaio Control settings, which unfortunately drops performance. For those who have used the Sony Vaio Pro 13 and found its fan too loud, the Flip 13 is even louder and more constant (the Pro 13 fan is generally busy only when plugged into power).

Back to battery life: the Vaio Flip 13 has a 3170 mAh Lithium Ion battery that's sealed inside. That's not a very big battery and in fact it's half the battery capacity of the Vaio Duo 13. I'm sure Sony went with a small battery to keep the machine very thin and light, and that's the tradeoff when you buy something even lighter than the 13" MacBook Air. Battery life isn't horrid at 6 hours; it's simply not excellent by Haswell standards. We average 6 hours of mixed use with automatic brightness disabled and display brightness set to 50% with WiFi and Bluetooth turned on. If you use a more power frugal plan setting (we used Balanced) or enable silent mode and drop the brightness a bit, you could get 7 hours. If that darned fan wasn't whirring away at all times, battery life could be even better.