Yesterday I was able to pay a visit to my local Best Buy and while there I discovered they had the new Surface Go on display.

The latest in the Surface hardware line is already available for pre-orders but you can’t buy it in store until next week on the 2nd of August. However, my timing was perfect because Best Buy stores have just started to put the new hardware on their Surface display tabletops.

So for a brief five minutes or so, I had the opportunity to pick up and check out the Surface Go. The model that is on display at Best Buy is the low end model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage using eMMC instead of a solid state drive. Otherwise, the processor is the same one, an Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y, that is in the high end model that has the 128GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM.

The first thing you notice is the devices size. It is strange seeing a Surface device with these dimensions and it is very obvious when it is sitting next to other Surface devices on the store display.

The device is very light, barely over one pound, and feels light in the hand. The edges of the device are smoother taking some of those sharp edges that are on earlier Surface devices. That makes it very comfortable in your hands.

You will also notice the large bezels on the device. While I believe the Surface team worked to make them as small as they could, the size we are left with is out of necessity for the devices engineering needs versus a specific design choice to make them that large.

The Surface Go I tried out had the burgundy Type Cover attached and as you might imagine, they had to squeeze things down to fit this compact keyboard. I type using a mix of touch, peck and eyeballs on the keyboard. I tried this one out and the results were horrible. I think for anyone moving from a full size keyboard to this will certainly have an adjustment period but that is not to be expected and typically occurs for all of us anyway.

The device was responsive to my input and browsing but this was not a test of heavy duty word processing or any other activities. That means the jury is still out on performance.

Five minutes is barely an introduction. I am looking forward to adding a Surface Go as part of my portfolio of devices and then putting it through its paces on a daily basis.

Have you had a chance to get a close up look at Surface Go yet?