Surface Book pre-orders now live in UK, shipping starts next month

Surface Book

Some good news has emerged about Microsoft's Surface Book, which will be available in the UK sooner than was previously rumoured – indeed, the convertible laptop has gone on pre-order today at the Microsoft online store and Currys/PC World.

Prices start at £1,299 for the Core i5 machine with integrated graphics, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The top-end Core i7 Surface Book with a discrete GPU along with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage will run you to almost double that at £2,249.

Microsoft expects to ship the devices by February 18, sooner than the rumour mill had indicated last November, when shipping was expected to begin in March or April.

The UK isn't the only fresh market that the Surface Book will soon be arriving in – in fact, the following new territories are also set to get the shiny new hybrid: Austria, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand and Switzerland, with availability being extended to more retailers in Australia, too.

The Surface Book has just gone on pre-order in China and Hong Kong, and Microsoft also said that the Surface Pro will be unleashed on India in the coming weeks.

This was all revealed along with the big announcement that Windows 10 has now been installed on over 200 million devices worldwide, a considerable jump from the figure of 110 million which Microsoft announced three months ago.

If you are thinking of buying a Surface Book now that pre-orders are live, check out our full review before you take the plunge.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).