Surface Pro 3 – First Thoughts

Thanks to a contest run by the Office Mix people I won a Surface Pro 3 for my school. And I get to use it which is great. I’ve had a Surface RT (first edition) for a while and while I like it the fact that it is Windows RT means I can’t run “regular” Windows apps on it. That is not always a problem since office is there and I can do a lot of web based things easily. But I teach programming so not being able to run Visual Studio is somewhat limiting. Also I could not use Windows Live Writer on it for blogging. Those issues go away with the Surface Pro 3.

First off the keyboard. Yes not quite the computer but I have a Type keyboard with my RT and while it works just fine it doesn’t give me the tactile feedback I like. The Pro came with a Touch keyboard and I love it. Looks great, feels great, is just enough bigger that it works better with my big hands and fat fingers. Recommended.

Performance is great. The screen is beautiful to look and the 12 inch screen is large3 enough for most things I do. And it is a touch screen I love touch. TouchDevelop works better with touch than with a keyboard and mouse for me. There may be a game or two that I occasionally play where touch is an advantage over a touch pad or even a mouse as well.

The whole unit is very light and it looks so far like battery life is going to be very good as well. Seems like a great computer for traveling or for 11 computing at school.

It came with a pen and I confess I haven’t used it yet. I probably will use it with creating Office Mixes as I think it will be easier to highlight things with a pen than it was with the mouse. This is going to work for me.

Set up was quick and easy and since I save things like favorites to OneDrive my web browser settings, screen background and more personalization came over from my other computer automatically. Good thing since the hard drive on my main personal laptop died yesterday. My most important files are all on OneDrive as well. So a possible catastrophe has been avoided.