Another quirk
The standard font was quite small, forcing me to hunch close to the screen to get a good look. You can scale up the size of everything in the desktop world, but not elsewhere. A function called Magnifier helps make small parts of the screen bigger, but at low resolution. And certain apps let you spread and pinch with your fingers to zoom in and out, but other apps don't. The lack of consistency makes the touch interface less enjoyable.
One other niggling complaint: Even though the screen size should make for perfect widescreen viewing in the 16:9 aspect ratio common for widescreen television, some Netflix movies with wider ratios continued to be shown with big black bars on top and bottom of the screen, wasting valuable screen space.
One big thing Microsoft got right was music. Xbox Music gives you a really clean interface, with beautiful moving graphics, and a "Smart DJ" feature, which plays entire songs in rotation in a genre - much like Pandora. You can also play songs or albums from a catalog of millions; it's free, with ads. In rare cases, you may get only 30-second previews because of licensing reasons, but those songs are also available for purchase from the app.
I liked how Xbox Music plays in the background. When you toggle the physical volume rocker, a little box with pause, forward and back buttons pops up in a corner and fades away quickly. That works with whatever happens to be using the speakers, including iHeart Radio. It allowed me to easily catch up on the morning's news and my email inbox at the same time.
Smart Glass, a feature that allows the Surface and other Windows devices to interact with the Xbox, was interesting but at times confusing. For instance, when I tried swiping through a menu of available videos, games and Xbox apps, I swiped right to left, but the menu on my TV screen went left to right. Same with up and down.
Microsoft says this configuration was intentional based on user research. But for me, it gave the impression that this was not, as CEO Steve Ballmer promised, a delightful product "right out of the box."
