The Surface Pro 9 still looks like a slightly less than 1cm thick tablet with a kickstand on the back. As usual with Surface products, the finishes are exemplary and the support mechanism leaves no doubt about its longevity.
To transform this tablet, you’ll need to add its dedicated Alcantara keyboard, which is magnetized to the bottom and folds away to hide the stylus pouch. For this reason it is usually used flat or slightly inclined thanks to two magnets that are fixed at the height of the lower edge of the screen.
The backlit keyboard offers decent typing, key travel is sufficient. However, it lacks overall stiffness and sounds a bit hollow, especially when tilted, with the space underneath acting as a soundboard.
The relatively small (especially in height) touchpad gets the job done. So we found ourselves making up for its lack of comfort by performing touch gestures directly on the screen. Left and right clicks are relatively loud with a distinctive “cloc” with each press.
Connectivity is reduced to its simplest expression with two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left edge. The home and volume buttons are on top, while the power connector maintains its position to the right of the screen. The jack plug just disappeared.
Wireless connectivity is entrusted to the Intel AX211 chip compatible with Wi-Fi 6E and its famous 6 GHz band at 2.4 Gb/s, but also with Bluetooth 5.2.
There are two sensors on the side of the webcam. The first 3.5 megapixel front is of excellent quality for video conferencing; the second 10 Mpx sensor will allow you to take pictures quickly. Note that the front webcam supports Windows Hello and therefore allows you to quickly unlock a Windows session.
To cool the ardor of the Core i7-1255U, Microsoft has fitted a fan, the extractions of which are located very discreetly on the upper edge of the tablet. So, after about thirty minutes of video encoding, the back of the device reaches just under 42C and the front is 40.6C. We didn’t notice any particular hot spots, and the metal surface on the back of the tablet doubles as a heat sink.
Despite this high demand, noise pollution is contained with a recorded level of 34.7 dB(A), which is not enough to disturb our office neighbours.
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