The touchscreen keyboard was no better for me, even though it offers some impressive shortcuts for finding other symbols and letters. For example, by striking a lower right key like the question mark, a user can slide off to the right in a gesture (since it's a touchscreen) to type the important @ symbol. That's impressive, but I'm not sure I'd ever use those shortcuts.

A big question for buyers will be whether to buy the Windows RT machine to use at work, but IT managers might advise against it because the tablet won't run older Windows apps. It ships with OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the Office Home and Student 2013 edition. That edition excludes Outlook email, but it can be set up to contact an enterprise email server, said.

The touchscreen functions on the Windows RT device were snappy. Swipes were as quick as on any or tablet that I've tested. That was a reassuring ingredient in the new machine.

After trying it for a while, I found the home screen with its live tiles to be easy to understand. I could touch a tile and jump right into an app or other function. As with Windows Phone live tiles, it is a big achievement for Microsoft.

The only thing I found confusing with the interface was that I kept wanting to use the tablet like a laptop with the cover keyboard. Instead of touching the screen, I kept reverting to using the touch mouse on the cover keyboard or the directional keys. I would think using it as a standalone tablets device for work tasks might take a while to master.