First let me state my biases. I am a long term Windows user, not out of any real love, but out of habit and necessity. I have an Android phone for which I do have real love. I dislike Apple though I admit it's more out of rebellion against the hipster hype than anything else - I can objectively see how they make beautiful products.
When my ancient PC laptop died last month, I started researching for its replacement. I NEEDED something that could handle serious work (I'm not designing rockets or anything but I do create big spreadsheets and image-heavy presentations with lots of programs open all the time). I also NEEDED something that had a decent sized screen but that was also fairly light and portable. But I WANTED a tablet type interface with a touchscreen for my personal / fun usage.
I looked at high-end ultrabooks, Macbooks, and the Surface Pro 3. With some trepidation, I pulled the trigger on the Surface. I resigned myself to another blah but at least predictable Microsoft experience. Boy, was I wrong. After two weeks of using it, I cannot believe how excited I am about a Microsoft product.
Here are the things I like the most:
- It is beautiful in sleek silver and black, unlike its predecessors.
- It has laptop guts. The Intel i5 an i7 processors are fast enough for most people's work needs.
- It has a large screen for a tablet, but is very light for a laptop. I find that I really can use it in both ways with ease.
- The pen feels and writes like a real pen with the right friction and ability to rest your palm on the screen like you would on paper. The top button opens up the included Notes app with one click even if the computer is locked (you can write a new note, not read old notes when locked). You can also buy a wonderful app for 4 or 5 bucks that lets you create and mark up PDFs using the pen. For the first time in my life, I am paper free and take all notes electronically.
- It boots from total shut down in 10 seconds. I couldn't believe it!
- I know there is disagreement here, but after using it, I actually like Windows 8.1! I like being able to use the traditional desktop and with one tap, go to the new-style Start screen that is more like a modern phone or tablet that's fun to use. You can pin almost anything to that screen, not only apps but also pictures, individual contacts, live weather and news tiles, folders, even specific webpages. There are some cool new touch actions, including being able to swipe in from the left edge to drag back recently used apps, which you can snap into half the screen as well as the full screen.
- I purchased the Office suite and it comes with 1 TB (Terabyte!) of free space on OneDrive, the MS Cloud storage. That's plenty of space for me to use it as backup space instead of external drives or paid backup services, and I'm also using it to transfer large amounts of files from other computers instead of messing with USB cables. It also lets me automatically backup camera roll pictures from both the Surface and my Android phone into one combined picture folder on OneDrive.
- The Music app without a hiccup imported all my itunes music and even my itunes playlists and allows me to listen to it all on my Android phone. Finally! Liberation from the shackles of itunes / ipod.
Of course it isn't perfect. The keyboard is somewhat flimsy if you're comparing to a laptop and the mousepad just isn't precise enough for some fine-tuning things like resizing or dragging small text boxes. And you have to pay extra for the keyboard which sucks. The Windows Apps store is currently pretty bare compared to Apple's or Android's. And you just get the feeling that Microsoft hasn't quite figured out the laptop / tablet or work / play or old school / new school hybrids yet and once in a while you feel the Frankenstein nature of it.
But all in all, this is very good and a unique offering in the market if it's what you are looking for.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KHR51D2/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00KHR51D2&linkCode=as2&tag=kingbaker-20&linkId=DXWE2XI6GKNQZORK