The Surface Pro 3 is really sweet. Main reason: the stylus and high-quality screen.<p>This is the closest thing to a digital sketchpad yet. I've been waiting for the Sony A4 e-ink tablet forever (and several other e-ink products that never materialized), and finally gave in to the Surface.<p>Unfortunately, despite being much better than what I expected, it's not great to use outdoors or in bright light.<p>However it <i>does</i> blow away the Galaxy Note and basically every "capacitive pen" you can try. The Note in particular has a ridicolous pen: too small to handle, horrid lag, missed strokes, very poor pen sensitivity and high screen glare even with office lights. I re-sold mine just after a few weeks.<p>The Surface stylus feels just like a regular pen, which is great. There's no space in the device for it, but if you see the depth of the tablet you realize that you cannot possibly fit it in there without sacrificying the pen itself. I'm <i>glad</i> they didn't shrink the pen.<p>Unfortunately the Pro 3 uses an n-trig 256-pressure levels sensor, which has a much lower resolution than the previous versions which were Wacom based. For writing/jotting down is ok, but for drawing the difference is noticeable. The lower sensitivity takes a toll when you try to customize the response curve...<p>I'm appalled why so many tablet vendors don't ship with a digitizer built-in. Strip that useless rear-facing camera and put a digitizer in there! You could go as far as selling without the pen by default, as long as there's an option to buy one!
I really love the discussion about making the friction hinge, it looks really cool, though I think over engineered. I think the most elegant friction hinge design I have ever seen was on my Panasonic CF-73. It's almost 14 years old now, used every day for at least 10 of those years, and I still use it time to time, and the hinge works perfect!<p>Here is an image of it: <a href="http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m8yCFI6LbAmeo1QDFT4iTHg.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m8yCFI6LbAmeo1QDFT4iT...</a><p>Simple, stupid, works :) Though for the surface, there is a requirement to make easy to open at first, first 20 degrees or so, which requires complexity.
Did somebody already install Linux on it? I think my next laptop will either be a MacBook 12 inch or whatever this new very light apple laptop is called. Or a Surface 3. I just need to be sure it runs Linux.
there is another video about the design of the surface:
<a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2326" rel="nofollow">http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2326</a>
I wish more of these types of videos had transcripts. Frequently I don't have enough time to sit down and watch all of this however if there were a transcript I could quickly scroll through it and find some of the highlights..