Gadgetory

every day I carry three gadgets with me a phone a laptop and a tablet the phone's not going anywhere but can the new surface pro 3 replace the other 2 Microsoft sure hope so this marks the third surface Pro the company has released and a little over a year and a half and it's a result of a completely relentless refinement on one single idea to find a hybrid of a tablet and a PC so you can use one device for both things let me get this out of the way first the surface pro 3 is really just gorgeous Microsoft has stuck with magnesium for the casing at a matte silver color that's a little darker than Apple style it has the classic angled lines of the original surface and there's a thin port for the fan across the top this is a PC after all and PCs need to be cooled Microsoft says that she'll never hear the fan and rarely feel any heat both of those statements are a little bit optimistic but the fan is nearly silent and the surface never got hot enough to be uncomfortable yes it's still a tablet but it's a very big tablet Microsoft has increased screen size to 12 inches and increase the resolution to a super-sharp 2160 by 1440 pixels that gives the screen a 3x2 aspect ratio and it makes a world of difference in using the surface when you pop up the keyboard and landscape there's actually enough screen left to do stuff on and in general it just feels more computer like than tablet like although the screen size has been bumped up the rest of the surface pro 3 has been shrunk down it's thinner and lighter than the last surface pro and even the current 13-inch MacBook Air you've got a single USB port in a single display port plus a nicely redesigned power jack that's easier to plug in and harder to bump out there's a micro SD card slot under the hinge and while I do wish that Microsoft had found a way to make that a full SD slot it does keep the whole thing thin there's also still pen input completing the tablet side of this equation the pen is bigger now with a nice round shape and a comfortable heft it no longer attaches to the side of the surface which is a bummer but the bottom line is that it's super accurate and fun to use one of the best features is that you can just click the top of the pen to instantly launch OneNote and jot stuff down there are five megapixel cameras on the front and the back they're fine eventually Microsoft will release a software update to let you take a photo and then draw right on top of it in OneNote but otherwise if you're depending on a device this big to take pictures you probably need to reassess your gadget priorities but the best design feature of the surface pro 3 is a new hinge the first surface only worked at 22 degrees which made it a desk only kind of affair the surface pro 2 gave you a second angle but this new model can go pretty much angle you want all the way down to 150 degrees it uses friction to hold itself in place and feels really sturdy maybe someday it'll get loose and slip around but my guess is that it won't Microsoft really wants you to believe that you can use the surface pro 3 on your lap and a big part of that as a new type cover it's 130 bucks and it's way better than last year's model Microsoft has cleverly added a second magnetic strip that folds up and attaches to the front of the surface that adds a ton of stability and it also elevates keyboard slightly which makes it much more comfortable to use but my favorite part is a new trackpad it's much bigger and it works much better than it did before but unfortunately it's still not as good as what you'll find on a real laptop in general Microsoft solutions for helping use this thing in your lap or better but there's still more complicated than the dead simple action of just lifting your screen up on a laptop battery life is pretty close to Microsoft's claim that it can last all day it lasted just under 8 hours in our battery drain test and when I was using it much more heavily I really didn't need to plug in until mid to late afternoon the model we tested had a Core i5 processor and 8 gigs of RAM and it rarely felt slow if ever because of the high resolution Microsoft has set a display scaling of 150% and it's a good default for most everything although a few apps can still look fuzzy here and there this isn't a gaming powerhouse by any stretch but it can handle the basics just fine on the software side the surface pro 3 runs Windows 8.1 pro and I still find that it's an operating system with a million great ideas that can sometimes still be a little frustrating to make sense of the split between the desktop world and the more modern app world is still here and it can still cause you to spend too much time arranging things Microsoft's app store still feels more barren of big-name quality apps than I'd like but it's improving fast and there's always a huge world of traditional Windows desktop apps to fall back on the surface pro 3 ranges from 799 for the bare-bones i3 model all the way up to 1949 for a top-of-the-line i7 model but most people are going to want to pick something somewhere in the $1300 range no matter which model you pick make sure you remember to kick in the extra 130 bucks for the type cover which is pretty much a must for this device is the surface pro 3 a laptop sort of if you don't mind a little awkwardness here and there is it a tablet sure but it's so big that's not really great for traditional tablet stuff like reading and casual games what the surface pro 3 really is is the best hardware and experience for Windows 8.1 whether you'll love the surface pro 3 will depend a lot on whether you love Windows that's increasingly a pretty big if for a lot of people but Microsoft has at least put its best foot forward