Microsoft offers a closer look at the new Surface Pro with LTE Advanced

Earlier today, Microsoft hardware chief Panos Panay today officially announced the Surface Pro LTE device during his keynote at the Future Decoded conference in London. This new Surface Pro with LTE Advanced comes with a Cat 9 modem with support of 20 LTE bands and offering up to 450 mbps of cellular data speeds. Microsoft even claims that it is the fastest LTE-enabled laptop in its class. Microsoft today posted a new video offering a closer look at the LTE improvements included in this new Surface Pro device. For example, the Surface engineering team has included 7 LTE antennas on top of the device for great connectivity.

The new Surface Pro with LTE Advanced, comes with a purpose-built state of the art LTE architecture for a new class of always on connectivity from almost anywhere on the planet.
As Tim Golik, Director of Surface Program Management, shares on this episode of Microsoft Mechanics, delivering on this while remaining true to the design heritage of Surface devices, is a significant milestone requiring a number of breakthrough engineering techniques

Other highlights of Surface Pro LTE:

• The LTE version of Surface Pro will be based on Qualcomm X16 Gigabit Class LTE modem. It will support up to 450 mbps.
• Microsoft has integrated the modem directly on the motherboard.
• They have optimized the sleep and hibernate states of the device to be more efficient when on LTE.
• The video playback battery life on a Surface Pro LTE device will be same as that of Surface Pro WiFi model.
• If you use LTE network exclusively on the Surface Pro device, you will get about 90% battery life of a WiFi model.
• Unlike your LTE smartphones, there will be a single Surface Pro LTE model for the entire world. So, any 4G LTE network around the world will support Surface Pro LTE. They are now getting certifications from various carriers around the world.
• Surface Pro LTE will support e-SIM and enterprise organizations can provision them using MDM. Surface Pro LTE also supports nano-SIM.

Surface Pro LTE with Intel Core i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD will cost $1,149 and the one with Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD will cost $1,449. Surface Pro LTE will be available to business customers for purchase in December.