The tablet experience on Windows 10 is about to get a whole lot better

Siah1214

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Dec 8, 2011
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...as well as some things you can do to make it better today.


I'm actually writing this post on my Go's touch keyboard because the new one in 20185 is so much better to use than the old one.

Here is my current configuration:

-Surface Go 8 gb

-Windows build 20185

-Power toys 0.20

-Edge Dev 86.0.594.1

We all know the tablet mode experience is sub par at best, I've stopped using it entirely. Instead, I use fancy zones for power toys. I like using my Go in portrait mode and it allows me to stack windows instead of snapping them side by side

https://imgur.com/a/PWOFgHd

This is the configuration I use for multitasking in portrait mode. I have another with a smaller “2“ zone that I use when I'm watching videos.

I truly believe this is the single best change you can make to improve the tablet experience. Make sure you disable “use shift to drag to zone“ so when you drag a window with your finger it will snap to the zone.

Moving on:
Since there's a lot of mainstream services that don't have a corresponding app in the store (or the app is terrible), I use edge PWAs. Normally the PWA is fully featured and touch friendly, and you can pin them to start to have a touch friendly way to access them. They live in their own window, many work offline, and they often use far fewer resources / battery compared to their native equivalent. Just as one example, open.spotify.com installed as a PWA uses far fewer resources and is much faster on my Go than the native Electron app.

These are two easy things you can do today to make the tablet experience way better.

Now as for what's next:

Like I said, I like using my surface in portrait mode, but having a lot of tabs open is not an ideal experience because the title bar is so narrow. Fortunately edge is finally adding vertical tabs.

If you're on Dev or canary, turn on this flag:

Enable Swipe to ShyUI
Reveal ShyUI with swipe down gesture. – Windows


This will enable a button by the tab row which will switch the tabs to a vertical strip showing favicons.

I've found this to be preferable to horizontal tabs because the tabs are under your thumb. I also put my Taskbar to the side of the screen for the same reason, I don't like to have to reach for controls.

Your Phone is another great tool if you have a Samsung device. Phone apps are always touch friendly and with the coming updates to Your Phone the experience is way better. You just have a floating window that allows you to interact with your phone almost as if it were a native app. I don't like to hop back and forth between devices so I pin my phone apps without a store or PWA equivalent to my Taskbar and its like they're running on my computer. My phone sits in my pocket or in its charger.

Finally, the new touch keyboard in 20185 (instructions to enable it here: https://geekermag.com/enable-new-windows-10x-keyboard-in-windows-10/) is 1000x better than the current one. I would never try to write this post on the current version. It's hard to describe why but touch detection, predictions, and layout all feel way better, it's honestly a joy to use.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone. I feel like the Surface has a lot of potential as a touch only device, it just takes Microsoft giving a crap and it seems like they finally are. Now if only they'd give some love to tablet mode.

Tldr: Fancy zones, edge dev, your phone, and 20185 dramatically improve the tablet experience on windows 10
 
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