[inquiry]

I have been ill lately, and spent more than 4 weeks in the hospital since May 30th on three different hospitalizations, and now have a chronic condition that will require extensive follow up. Anyway, after I was released the third time, my wife thought I needed a pick-me-up kind of thing so she surprised me by buying me a i7 Surface Pro 3 with 8 GB RAM and the 512 GB drive for my Birthday.

I am not a luddite, but I have never owed a tablet before. There are a lot of ipad's in my extended family, and I have toyed with them on many occasions, but never felt the need to own one. I don't do twitter, facebook, and seldom watch videos or listen to streaming or stored digital music. I do read a lot of PDF's and other digital material on my phone and laptop, and work Sudoku puzzles and BBO bridge but phone app is fine for those for me. I use my laptop a lot, and it is a beast (i7, 17.4 inch monitor, 2.25 TB of disk space one 1.5 TB drive, and a 750 GB SSD-hybrid drive, and has 16 GB of DDR3 RAM. I love my laptop, so when the surface pro 3 entered the house as primarily a tablet, not a laptop replacement, but I did get the $129.00 keyboard with the pro 3. My laptop is heavy, I don't remember the exact weight, but it up around 10 lbs, I have a huge (and heavy) case to carry it and the brick charger when I travel with it. The hope is was that the very light pro 3 (just over a pound) would be suitable to allow me to leave the laptop at home for trips (and future hospital stays, if necessary).

I have had the pro 3 since August 1st. The date is quite a coincidence. I had a Mayo clinic appointment that day, it was my birthday, it was the day the i7 was released and could be purchased and the Microsoft store was on 5 miles from the Mayo clinic directly on the way back to my home and right next to the restaurant I wanted to eat my birthday lunch at. In addition, it was the first day of a three day Florida sales tax-free weekend. When we bought it at the Microsoft store they gave me the educational discount although I am retired (I showed my university stuff), and we saved some of the sales tax on tax-free weekend deal, so we a nice discount. Both of those were unexpected.

First the buying experience. Microsoft has hired some very nice, but not exactly technically gifted people to greet people in their store and try to sell them these things. The guy who sold us my unit was really nice, but not that familiar with the device. I could run through all of what he didn't know, which was a lot, but the big mistakes he told me included: 1) that you can't write to cells in excel with the pen, you can only draw on the excel spreadsheet -- and he "confirmed that" with someone else (I knew that wasn't true), 2) the i5 and i7 have the same video card, 3) you had to buy something like dragon speak if you want to dictate to the surface pro, 4) windows 8.1 has all the current upgrades already when you take it out of the box (including the critical mid-july one), 5) he didn't know that you can't replace the battery in the surface pro yourself. There were others too.

It took me about 40 seconds to figure out how to write to excel cells with the pen, if you using handwriting, a fatter nib on the pen works best, the salesman kept it at its finest setting during all the handwriting demos in the store and almost lost a sale because of that. Once I fattened up the pen, it could read my chicken scratch with great accuracy. The biggest frustration was when I took it out of the box, a number of the known problems (wi-fi, not turning on if you shut it down with the keyboard attached, not rotating from landscape to portrait when you turn the tablet) showed up. If I hadn't read about all of these and had a working laptop to figure out how to turn the damn thing back on and get the critical updates installed, Microsoft would have soon had the i7 back.

When I first started using the pro 3, it was solely as a tablet. I am extremely excited about it as a tablet. The 12 inch screen is beautiful, and reading digital content is easy on the eyes. As far as playing bridge on bbo, you play just like you do on any windows machine. One complaint I have heard repeatedly is the lack of "apps" for windows 8.1 which is suppose to make the tablet not as useful. This turns out to be not true. There are excellent android emulators you can install that can run most all android app that runs on an android phone or android tablet. I tried out the free bluestack and ran a few android apps effortlessly. I have heard some 3D app don't work so well, but I don't have any of those. So you get all the windows apps, plus most the android apps. That pretty much is more apps than anyone needs, as well as any windows program

Since I hope to travel with the pro 3 instead of my heavy laptop, after a few days of exclusive tablet use with handwriting and voice=to=text trials, I decided to attach the keyboard and see how bad it was as a laptop. I once had a 10 inch dell laptop that was pain the ass to type on, and since then I have insisted on 17 inch laptops both for the large screen and nice, wide keyboards. To my utter surprise, after a little practice, I could type very effectively on the pro 3, even with it perched in my lap. The first day, I tried this, the screen keep flipping towards me when I moved in my chair. The reason for this is the kick stand keeps the screen from falling away from you, but there is nothing to keep it from folding back towards you. If your hands are on the keyboard, it just crashes into your hands. But I learned if I tilted the screen back just a little further, that stopped. I am a fast typist, and this keyboard doesn't slow me down -- or at least not much. Also, I found the laptop fits comfortably in my lap. As far as heat and noise, the only time -- so far -- that it got hot was 1) when it upgraded the operating system (see above), and 2) the first time I installed norton 360 and ran a full system scan. Also, while using it and charging the battery, it gets a little warm, but certainly nowhere near hot. Each time it only gets hot is one place, and the heat is not intense or uncomfortable to the touch, you just notice it. There is also what sound what fan noise when the heat builds up, but I don't think it has a fan inside it.

I have found myself using the pro 3 as a laptop now even with my larger, probably more suitable, laptop sitting right next me. The reason being it is much more comfortable in my lap than the larger laptop, which does get too warm at times to hold in the lap. So my laptop has now become solely a desktop that I use when sitting at a table rather than in my recliner or on the sofa.

So who is the surface pro 3 for? Clearly not everyone. First, it is EXPENSIVE. The sales pitch is it can replace several devices (laptop, tablet, and with the docking station even desktop.... I don't know much about the docking station). I think most people will be more than delighted with an ipad or samsung galaxy tablet, which are much, much cheaper. You would have to want the flexibility to run windows programs on your tablet and probably want to replace your laptop before the price of the surface pro 3 becomes acceptable. I wish I had one of these when I was a medical researcher. I use to print out thousands of scientific article PDF's and marked them up with a yellow highlighter and add notes with red ink in the margins. With PDF annotator ($69 program) or PDF-xchange viewer (just about as good, and free) you can mark them up nicely and read them on the device in portrait mode. I still read a lot of these and now don't have to print them out and could just store them electronically. This isn't specific for pro 3, but it works much better in the portrait mode on the pro 3 than my laptop. The note taking with the pen would also be very useful for students. If I had a student in college, I would certainly buy them a pro 3.

I guess graphic artist might like it for the pen and drawing concept, lawyers who need things signed would like it for the same reason, because they can have their clients sign electronic versions of PDF's etc and not have to carry so many pages around with them. The fact that it is windows machine machines that the pro 3's can be networked back at the office and taken to the clients. I know some of my physician friends back in DC are using surface pro 2's in their practices, so I can easily see them upgrading to pro 3's. In other words, to justify the cost of pro 3, you probably need either a business application that needs windows or really want to use the pro 3 as multiple devices (laptop, tablet, drawing pad, and maybe desktop replacement).

Did I need a surface pro 3? Did I need the most expensive one? Could I have waited until the added LTE to it, and maybe lower power chip sets and processor to extend the battery life? I guess I didn't need one, so I certainly could have gotten by with the i5 256 GB one. As for LTE, I can use my phone as a hotspot and surf the web so I wouldn't pay extra for LTE on the tablet. The battery has been running more than 8 hours with each use, and I never use it long enough to run it down. When it gets below 10% I recharge it. So for me, I am happy with the expenditure for the device. Will it ever be a top selling "tablet"? Absolutely not. But for those who want what this things has to offer, they will be very happy with their purchase. I like mine more and more each day.

As for playing bridge on BBO with it? It is now my preferred way to play bridge on BBO. The graphics looks great and the screen size is perfect for the game. My android is too small, I wasn't even that impressed with the ipad app, the computer is alright but the natural use of touch screen in the 12 inch format is great. Of course, no one is going to layout what one of these things cost just to play bridge on BBO..... but it is a nice side benefit.

[wank]

i bought the first surface pro. i think it's very good. i will get a new one eventually.

[kenberg]

I am so far behind! I have decided that an extremely important feature for me is that I have only one computer that I put anything on. At one time I used my desktop downstairs, my laptop here and there, and a university machine when there. Really bad. Finding anything was a challenge. Yes I know about dropbox. And drive. More places to have to look for things, Anyway, now I use the laptop and only my laptop. Becky has her own, and largely we keep Ken's stuff on Ken's, Becky's stuff on Becky's.

But should I get a Surface? Maybe, but not today. I didn't even know it existed. When it is time to move on to a new level of confusion, I will put it in the hopper as a possibility. My current machine does what is needed, and I don't mind the weight (I just got back from Portland, carrying it with me at the Math meetings) but I like to be up to date, or at least not totally out of date, so maybe soon.


I, and all of us, are happy to hear you are back in action.

Ken

[blackshoe]

kenberg, on 2014-August-11, 09:02, said:

I, and all of us, are happy to hear you are back in action.

Ken

I'll second that.