On the back of news that Microsoft is to bring Surface to the UK, it’s been showing off the device at this year’s CeBIT. PC Pro got a private hands-on demo with Surface’s director of product management, the superbly named Matt Champagne.

Sitting idle in the darkened demonstration room, the 30in Surface screen showed a screensaver-style pond animation, with rippling water. Just sitting beside it, our fingers were itching to try. Touching the tabletop produced water ripples around each fingertip; swishing a hand across the water gave an effect eerily identical to swishing your hand through real liquid.

Touching the corner of the display brings up a Media Center-style menu of applications. Waving a hand across it scrolls the list, iPod style, with momentum according to how fast you swish. Champagne first showed off the photos app, and it’s unbelievably effective. You can flick photos across the table from a stack, twizzle them round with two fingers to face you, and zoom them with a two-finger stretching motion. The word ‘intuitive’ was never more apt.

Champagne then showed off a few of the more esoteric features. One used Surface to display patient records: select one and you can show that patient’s medical scans in a real-time draggable 3D view.

Second was a slightly less convincing use of object recognition: dropping tokens on the table produced a set of options surrounding that token, the idea being that they’re used as marketing trinkets although we couldn’t immediately see the point.

Finally there was a jukebox. Albums can be dragged from a stack and spread across the table like the photo app. Tapping them shows the list of tracks and then dragging a track over to the playlist windows adds it to the list. Great for parties, but with the 13,000 Euro price tag, not likely to be overtaking iPods this Christmas.

And that price – and the bulk – of the Surface means it’s limited to commercial use for the foreseeable future. Asked if the price will come down, Champagne was cagey but conceded that the development team “still have a lot of work to do to cost-engineer this product”. It’s aimed squarely at “vertical” markets like retail demonstration booths, bars, financial services and education.

It’s not perfect in use either: the liquid-smooth animations when dragging and flicking photos around occasionally stuttered with what’s presumably the enormous processing power required, and our attempts to drag music tracks onto a playlist needed a lot of experimental stabbing before it worked. There was also a tendency for the system to misinterpret drags as zoom actions and vice-versa. Finally, it doesn’t have any ability to sense pressure – it’s all done purely by an array of five infrared cameras watching the scene from below – so the instinct to press harder when something isn’t working is wasted. That need for cameras to get a clear view of the whole surface also means that the roughly 15-inch-deep Surface cabinet can’t yet be miniaturised.

What’s more, it won’t be possible to directly port the same applications from Surface to the multi-touch-enabled Windows 7. Surface’s touch recognition can cope with dozens of simultaneous fingertips, whereas Champagne explained that standard resistive or capacitive touchscreens can currently cope with only two and “maybe three or four down the line”. And although the applications running on Surface are running on a standard PC, there’s a lot of extra dedicated pattern-recognition hardware connected to the cameras.

So it doesn’t quite work perfectly, but when it does it’s almost unbearably brilliant. Don’t be at all surprised if you see it in a bar near you very soon indeed.