Microsoft announce the Surface Pro 3

Today Microsoft held its 3^rd Surface event announcing the Surface Pro 3. The event started with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talking about a cloud first and mobile strategy for all devices. Microsoft said they were not aiming to compete with OEMS but create new categories and the Surface was designed to enable users to “watch and make a movie with the one device”. Panos Pany highlighted the problem of having two devices, a tablet and a laptop and they wanted to remove the conflicting choice and the Surface Pro 3 is their solution.

The Surface Pro 3 is 9.1mm thin and has a 12 inch screen which should help make it more of a laptop replacement and has 2160×1440 display. It weighs 800 grams and is fanless and even survived a drop test during the demo. The idea of the Surface is a replacement for a tablet and a laptop and this could be the one device that you carry around without any compromises. Photoshop was show off optimised for the Surface 3 pointing out that you can run full Windows programs on it.

The kickstand has been improved, it now goes from 22 to 150 degrees which Microsoft call “lapabitly”. There is a new Type Cover with an improved trackpad which is a welcome improvement as that was the weakest link in the Type Cover 2 and the keyboard also now locks in when you are using it on your lap another welcome improvement.

The Surface 3 comes with an active pen which apps can take advantage of and even turns on the Surface with a click button on the pen and it even launches OneNote ready for note taking. The integration with OneNote looked impressive.

One other interesting thing to note is the Windows key is no on the right hand side of the bevel and not at the bottom of the screen, for a 8 inch tablet which is generally used in portrait mode that makes sense but for a large tablet I would expect it would be used in landscape mode most of the time and the button would make sense to be at the bottom of the screen. Maybe Microsoft think the Surface Pro 3 will be used for note taking more than the previous devices.

The Surface Pro 3 starts at $799 and come with i3, i5 and i7 processor options and will be on sale tomorrow. Microsoft seem to have made a good step forward with the Surface Pro 3, it will be interesting to see what the UK pricing will be. In terms of size and weight it could easily replace my Surface 2 and for power it could replace my Notebook, it comes down to what the UK price will be.

I wonder what happened to the Surface Mini?