re: Ultimate Student Guide To Using Microsoft Surface 3

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I wish I had a pro 3 instead of a surface 1. That thing is cool, but it's not nearly as useful.

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The Surface 3 has an Intel processor and runs all the regular Windows applications. Your Surface 1 had an ARM processor and ran Windows RT, which could only run Office programs and not much else. The Surface 1 and Surface 3 cannot be compared. They are not even close to being in the same category. The Surface 3 can do almost anything that the Surface Pro 3 can do with limitations (because of the weaker processor and 4 GB of RAM).

Read this Surface 3 review to learn more: LINK

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To understand the Surface 3, you must first understand the Surface Pro 3.

The Surface 3 is not the third Surface. It's not a successor to the Surface RT released in 2012 or 2013's Surface 2. Those systems used ARM processors and could not run common-or-garden Windows desktop software.

In many ways, these devices exacerbated all the flaws found in Windows 8. The operating system had a decent enough touch interface, but it was desperately incomplete, forcing the use of the Windows desktop interface even if you were trying to use fingers and the on-screen keyboard. The ARM devices took it a step further: the only third-party applications they supported came through the Windows Store and offered those same finger-friendly interfaces—but they also included Office, in all its finger-unfriendly glory, running on the Windows desktop. They took Windows 8's awkward hybridity and turned it up to 11. As Nigel Tufnel might have put it, "it's one worse."

The Surface 3's heredity is, instead, the Surface Pro line. The Surface Pro and the Surface Pro 2 were both somewhat clumsy. They had the same basic form factor and concept as the Surface RT and Surface 2, but these were thicker, louder, heavier, and hotter tablets. They packed in x86 processors. What they lost in portability and longevity, however, they made up for in versatility. The processors meant that they could run more or less any Windows application ever written, and their integrated stylus support won them praise from both OneNote fans and digital artists.

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