The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 arrived at our door-step WEDS yesterday evening. Pretty quick. The Microsoft point of distribution was in Shenzhen China. The order was placed on Sunday evening, processed the following afternoon by DHL, picked-up by the courier company the next afternoon on TUES, and arrived in Singapore proper just before noon time yesterday. A quick call to DHL customer service got me the delivery time I wanted – evening since we would be out of home until then – and the item arrived on the dot.
Alongside the main Surface Pro 3 (short formed to this post to just SP3) unit was also a tempered glass screen protector. I figured that the latter was a must-have, given the fact that I intended to use the stylus a lot with the tablet/ultrabook/hybrid thingie, and also that the packaged Surface Type Cover’s keys would be coming into close contact with the display screen each time the keyboard flap was closed. There were of course cheaper films available for screen protections, but I’ve always found those things pretty difficult for amateurs like myself to apply, while tempered glass protectors are just so much easier to lay on the screen and achieve a seamless fit on the screen.
Random impressions after about a day of use of the SP3 and also Windows 8.1.
The build quality of the SP3 is attractive, and its matte-styled back case won’t be picking up finger-prints. It doesn’t quite provide the same premium feel as say the aluminum Unibody case you find on MacBooks, but it’s still decent.
The screen provides decent viewing angles and brightness levels that’s good for normal indoor use, though outdoor use would be a real challenge. There’s some obvious light-bleeding and unevenness when the screen is blacked out and thus mildly depressing, though once the Windows desktop boots up, it’s no longer a visible issue.
My i5 4GB RAM unit is the entry-level i5 unit and adequate for browsing and most office productivity work. Trying out a couple of flash-based 3D content though clearly was gonna push the unit, as there as some noticeable lag where the integrated Intel Integrated HD 4400 graphics unit was trying very hard to cope, alongside the semi-limited amount of working RAM.
No problems balancing on my legs in a seating posture the SP3 with the kick-stand extended and typing on the the type cover. Typing on the latter isn’t the most stable platform to while balancing it on legs, as the entire contraption jiggles a little as you type away.
The high-resolution screen is indeed helpful but also challenging when hooked up to external monitors. My workplace monitor is a Dell 27″ that produces lovely colors but also at a relatively low 1920×1080 resolution. The final text scaling factor I used to balance between avoiding overly small fonts on the SP3 and not overly large fonts on the much larger monitor was 135%.
The device’s power connection plug is just a tad loose. Not enough for it to fall off on its own thankfully, but stronger magnets between the power plug and the device would have provided for assurances that a good power connection has been made.
The i5 and i7 units according to reviews seem to have challenges in easy heat dissipation. I haven’t stretched my own SP3 unit very much at this juncture, but the unit’s fan kicked in – quite audibly – while downloading and processing the whole bunch of software and firmware updates when it was first hooked up online.
And as for Windows 8.1 – ugh. I dislike it, and spent the better part of an hour trying as hard as I could to make Windows look and work like Windows 7! My biggest peeve is the need to integrate the SP3’s account login to my Microsoft account just so that I can get Onedrive to work properly.
A call to Dell to find out the status of my order of the XPS 13 revealed that parts shortage at the assembly plant meant that there might be some delays to my actually receiving the notebook. Gah. Hopefully not too long, but in the worse case, at least there’s the SP3 that I can use now.:)
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