PlayPart of the "play" element of Surface should have been the joy of just getting around using the touch screen, but some things made it confusing.
At first, I didn't have a problem with the need to swipe in from the edges to make certain options appear.
Swiping in from the right brings up several buttons including ones for searching, changing settings or returning to the start screen. When you first set up the device, an explanatory graphic pops up to walk you through it. You hold the device with both hands and the screen lengthwise, and you do the swiping with your thumbs. This is very different from the idea of holding the tablet with one hand and touching it with the other, which Apple's iPad seems to favor.
Swiping down from the top lets you either discard an app completely (by swiping through the bottom of the screen) or create a split screen for multitasking (by pushing the app to the left or right until it snaps in place). Swiping up from the bottom brings up app-specific options.
The problem is swiping in from the left. When you do so, it takes you back to the previous app you had open. I was impressed with how snappy the tablet was flipping between programs.
But I got confused sometimes with websites. I wanted to go back a page, not leave the app completely. The difference between these two functions is swiping in from beyond the edge or swiping in from just near it. I often found myself in places in applications without knowing how to return easily.
Also, if you swipe back through apps quickly, you can zip past the one you want, but you can't swipe forward to return to it. As a stopgap, you can swipe in slightly and then back out of the left side to get a list of previous apps. But this is not really intuitive and you have to be careful to touch the one you want when the list comes up.
This painstaking learning takes some of the fun out of having a tablet and makes it maddening to use at times.
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