So I recently bought a Surface 3. Yes, I know. My home network has been a mix of OSX, iOS, Linux and FreeBSD devices but now it will also have one Windows machine.
This is also my first time buying a computer that runs Windows.
The device itself is quite awesome, I really do like it and especially at that price point where it competes with an iPad. It’s a very capable device if you can live with Windows running on it.
In fact I’m writing this post on it. I also owned the first Surface RT and that was garbage. But with Surface 3 things have changed.
The form factor is good, the screen is great and battery life is decent. It has no trouble playing videos, browsing web, editing office docs and of course, you can run putty and manage your unix boxes. It can do anything, it’s just not super fast when it does it.
This Surface uses an Intel Atom quad core SoC. It has 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB storage (not and SSD though but some other, slower kind of flash). You can expand the storage using a microSD card (yes it will be a bit slow) and you can plug in any USB device you want.
But most importantly for me – you can charge it using micro USB. Yes, you need a capable charger, with a 1A charger it does take quite a while but if you have a 2A charger then it is much better.
And of course micro usb means – charge it from your battery pack, which means use it on the long flights/trips which is great.
Overall quite happy with it.