The original Microsoft Surface was a pretty impressive piece of technology, with an impressive $15,000 price tag and an impressive bulk to go with it.

Replacing the NEC cameras inside with what Microsoft calls 'PixelSense' (where the individual pixels are also infrared cameras) means Surface 2 is only 4 inches thick – so you can get your feet underneath it or hang it on the wall.

It's both faster (thanks to GPU acceleration in Windows 7 courtesy of the dual-core AMD Athlon II X2 and Radeon HD 6700M inside) and cheaper (prices start around $7,600).

It's also a beautiful, vivid screen thanks to hardware partner Samsung (the Surface 2 hardware will be officially called the Samsung SUR40 when it goes on sale later this year).

Microsoft says the 40-inch screen is the biggest piece of Gorilla Glass ever glued onto an LCD (so you can still put cans of beer and cups of coffee down on it without worrying) and the new Surface interface uses the real estate well, with a long strip of applications that you scroll through sideways.

As with the original Surface, apps fill the entire screen and multiple people can sit around a Surface and play with elements on screen. Surface 2 can cope with more than 50 simultaneous touch points.

We tried several apps with two and three people grabbing, dragging, zooming and rotating images and everything moved fluidly. You tend to use only a couple of fingers on each hand as you interact with Surface, so the limit seems to be as much how many people can fit around a Surface.

Microsoft showed us what the infrared cameras in each pixel see on an external monitor; where your fingers touch the screen are bright points of light and your hand is a pale blur behind it – and as your palms get closer to the table they glow brighter.

Surface 2 can see the text printed on a sheet of paper – like a photocopier – and you can grab hold of that digital copy, drag it around or save it up to the cloud. If you put down something it can read like a book or a membership card, Surface 2 can recognise it; that's how the Royal Bank of Canada will scan the competition entries it mails out to customers to bring into a branch. You can also put Microsoft Tags onto objects that are harder to tell apart.

One energy drink can is very like another, so Red Bull will be tagging cans and that when you put a can down in the 'World of Red Bull' app, it launches a ring of controls around the base of the can playing video of Red Bull events like Flugtag.

Pick a video that looks interesting and drag it out of the ring to watch it; you can have several people dragging and resizing videos at once. The video controls worked well, but the Surface didn't always recognise the cans when we moved them around the screen; Microsoft did tell us it's an early version of the firmware and we expect this to improve quickly.

The Bing app will include maps and local search but so far it's only doing image search from a search box displayed at a rakish angle on top of the usual gorgeous Bing backgrounds. The onscreen keyboard is pretty responsive and the results show up as a pile of photographs scattered in one corner of the Surface.

You can drag pictures around, make the ones you want to see bigger and if you like one particularly, double-tap it to get a Microsoft Tag you can scan with a smartphone to download the image. The Bing app is multi-user; while you're playing with your photos someone else can do their own search and get their own pile of pictures to look at (the search keyword sits on the Surface in a toolbar that lets you close all the images at once to make space).

Now that Surface isn't tied to the size and shape of the bulky internal cameras, you can choose whether you want it the height of a desk or down as a coffee table (just put longer legs on it); that makes it a little more comfortable to use.

The disadvantage of the new design is that the enormous Samsung logo is a bit distracting. On the software side, there are obviously some minor touch issues to iron out before launch but Surface 2 is just as engaging and fun to use – and still aimed only at commercial environments.