Building Microsoft Surface Pro 3 [video]

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.

Unfortunately, despite being much better than what I expected, it's not great to use outdoors or in bright light.

However it does 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.

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 glad they didn't shrink the pen.

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...

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!

Tablets and digital sketchpads are sort of alien to me as concepts. I like a pen and paper for sketching and a desktop when I'm designing/developing. A laptop for on-the-road server maintenance or random, trivial updates to projects (though some of these tasks can even be done from my iPhone).

The iPad and the Chromebook just about make sense as your go-to device when you can't sleep or you're having a lazy Sunday morning. Or as web-browsers while you're watching a movie and need to Google something more interesting that the shitty movie you're watching. But these are kind of luxury devices considering that I can use my phone for these tasks, so the tablet-tier device seems to be an expensive statement accessory.

That said, I've tried a few tablets. Especially since my wife kept pressuring me to buy her one. So I tried the Nexus 7 & 10, the Surface and the iPad. The Surface was by far the least crippled of the devices.

From the video, power consumption & latency were the driving factors.

http://www.geek.com/microsoft/linux-users-rejoice-heres-ubun...

I'd definitely look into just... installing Hyper-V and then installing Linux as a VM. But people have wiped the Surface Pro for Ubuntu.