Hi all. I’m a Hyper Early Bird i7 V owner. I’ll start this little review by first stating that I am still very happy with my Eve V. I use it every day at university and it has made life significantly easier (coming from having no laptop).
My university degree is physics, so I write with the V Pen for long periods of time, every day. In general, the writing experience is great. It would be better to have more pressure sensitivity - despite 1024 levels I think there may still be an issue with the drivers causing the pen input to be recognised below a certain level of pressure. The pen input latency (which is very little) is easy to get used to, so I don’t notice it anymore. There is an issue with OneNote (where I write all my notes) where after scrolling quickly through long pages of notes, the OneNote page turns white and OneNote must be restarted for the notes to reappear on the page. This doesn’t appear to be exclusive to the V, however, I have seen reports of this bug from SP4 users. There is also sometimes an issue with the V Pen where after using the eraser button for 7+ seconds, the eraser won’t deactivate after the button is unpressed. This can be fixed by pressing the eraser button a few times - though annoying, it is an easy fix. I’ve also noticed that on occasion the pen input simply isn’t detected, though I suspect this is just a V Pen battery life issue - twisting the pen top to disconnect the V Pen battery and then twisting it back on (essentially a hard restart of the V Pen) fixes this issue.
After about 6 months, the first V Pen nib became very loose and actually fell out of the pen. Replacing it with one of the provided replacement nibs was no problem and it fits very tightly. There is quite a bit of paint scuffing on the V Pen, especially around the tip, likely due to the high amount of use it gets:
I might replace the V Pen with one of the new Surface Pens soon. Since the Surface pen also has the flat side, I imagine it would stick to the V much stronger with the magnets - the V Pen is held rather weakly.
The V itself is wonderful, I haven’t had any problems at all with it. Other than university work, I do a lot of web development, design, and programming in general (PhP, Matlab, Python, C) and it powers through those tasks without a hiccup. Obviously Word documents have no problem - though if there are like 100+ equations in the document it does start to slow down when scrolling. Adobe Illustrator runs quite well and is nice to use with the pen. Adobe Photoshop gets a bit slow for large projects, but otherwise has no issues.
Since I use the V with the magnetic sleeve on a daily basis, there is a fair bit of paint scuffing on the edges but also on the back in two very distinct places:
This must be an issue with the design of the sleeve - there isn’t any other way that those scuffs in the back corners of the kickstand could have happened. Also, I recommend removing the pen before the V from the sleeve so that the Pen’s clip doesn’t scratch down the side of the V (this also means the pen must be put in the sleeve so that the clip is turned away from the V).
The keyboard is generally very nice to type with - the keys have great travel (especially compared to the new MacBook Pros), and have a nice clickiness to them. Occasionally the ‘M’, ‘N’, ‘B’, and the ‘F’ key when pressed feels like it is snapping back into place, which is a bit strange but doesn’t actually affect the input. The touchpad is pretty good, all the gestures you could want work. I have noticed that sometimes when using the touchpad without a solid surface behind it, the bottom edge of the touchpad refuses to click down (but tap to click still obviously works).
I have some issues with the pogo pins on the keyboard. Sometimes I notice that one or two of the pins are bent a significant amount forwards - the first time I saw it I kind of freaked out. The bent pins can just be pushed back in line with the others and they almost click back into place. I’m not sure if this is by design, but it was a bit freaky. Sometimes the touchpad can also be a bit inaccurate when trying to very finely click on things - it might click on the thing very slightly next to it.
The great thing about a device like this is that perhaps in the future, Eve-tech can release an upgrade to the keyboard that fixes these issues.
Otherwise, I’m still happy with my i7 Eve V. I might get the white carbon-fibre dbrand back skin to cover up the scuffs and protect the device from the sleeve (that is a weird thing to say). Who’s tried one of the dbrand skins? How did they turn out?
? But does the surface pro keyboard fit? If so, anyone knows if there’s a non- Alcantara option?
