Microsoft Surface 3 Review - In Depth : Performance, Minecraft, Pen, and more!

Buy it on Amazon - (affiliate link) - Microsoft just released the little brother to its premium Surface Pro tablet called the Surface 3.
Buy this used item at my store for a discount!
Unlike the previous iterations of their low cost tablets, this one runs the full version of Windows 8.1 vs. the crippled Windows RT that did not run regular Windows software.
CORRECTION: Apparently it is made out of magnesium and not plastic. But it really feels like plastic and not a metal. I will be making a followup video on this soon.
Video Index:
00:02 - Hardware overview
00:28 - Kickstand demonstration
00:55 - Portrait web browsing
02:21 - Type Cover overview
03:06 - Using Surface as a laptop
03:41 - Overview of ports
04:26 - Keyboard and Surface Pen overview
05:46 - Web browsing performance and benchmarks
08:52 - Surface Pen demonstration in One Note
10:35 - Microsoft Word demonstration
11:56 - Minecraft demonstration
12:53 - Battery Life
13:57 - Conclusion and final thoughts
The $499 price tag is only the beginning. The keyboard, called the Type Cover, commands an additional $130. The Surface Pen (a fancy stylus) costs an additional $50.
So with the keyboard the Surface 3 costs about as much as some of the Core M devices I've looked at recently. But the Surface 3 only has 2 gigs of RAM (compared to 8 on a comparable priced Asus UX305), 64 gigs of storage (compared to 256 on the Asus) and the surface runs a much slower Atom processor. On one benchmark the Asus was twice as powerful as the Microsoft Surface 3.
So what are you paying for? Premium industrial design. This is a nice and very light weight tablet that does function well as a laptop too. I have yet to find any Windows device fill both roles successfully. It even works on a lap although not as comfortably as a true laptop computer.
This is a nicely constructed device that is, for the most part, worth its premium price tag. But Microsoft's choice of the Atom processor limits its performance and it's puzzling why they would go this route while many of their competitors are using faster Core M chips.
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