Bump! I got a SP3 (the i5 256 gb model) a few weeks ago, as a combined birthday/christmas present from my parents, my wife, and myself. Overall I like it. But it’s an unusual device and probably not suited for everyone.
(I’ve posted another Wall Of Text about my opinions of Windows 8 in another thread.)
As a de facto desktop, like a lot of people use their laptops, the SP3 is just fine. Plenty of performance for moderately heavy duty desktop use, Win8.1 is a perfectly functional desktop OS, done. It doesn’t have many ports, but with a $25 USB hub/ethernet adapter combo, I have all I need. Right now I have it plugged into a proper keyboard and mouse, and a second monitor. I have only one nitpick, and it’s the display scaling. My options are, as far as I can tell: 100% scaling for both displays (waaay too tiny on the SP3), 200% for both (way to big on the second monitor), or 125% (external) & 150% (SP3), 125% & 175%, or 150% and 200%. The non-integer scaling works well enough on the SP3 screen since it such a high pixel density (216 dpi), but it’s hideous on the external (at 86 dpi). I can’t just set it to 100% and 200%, except by cutting the SP3 display resolution in half like some kind of barbarian. Like so much else about the SP3, the display scaling falls into the category of nearly brilliant things marred by a single frustrating flaw.
I thought I might be able to take advantage of the pen for working with simple vector graphics in Illustrator CS6, but for my needs it ends up being more awkward than keyboard+mouse. I’ve read elsewhere that the SP3 works quite nicely for actual sketching, particularly with recent versions of Adobe CC.
As a laptop, the keyboard isn’t half bad by laptop keyboard standards. It’s a nicely portable laptop when I have it on a solid surface. But between the loosely hinged keyboard and the kickstand, actually using it on your lap is a little awkward.
Then, there’s using it as a tablet. As mentioned above, I want to read and annotate PDFs, and have a digital notebook. The pen is great, and the screen is both beautiful and the right aspect ratio to match letter or A4 paper. The app version (there has to be a better term…) of OneNote is pretty slick, though I wish it had just a little bit more of the desktop version’s versatility. For one example, I can’t change the default size for typed text! Every time I type I have to manually set it from 10 point to something readable. For reading and annotating my collection of PDFs, I’ve been using Drawboard PDF, one of the few non-terrible apps in the Windows store. It’s got a solid feature set and interface, letting me quickly flip between pages, and highlight and scribble in the margins to my heart’s content. But it’s pretty glitchy and unstable (good thing it autosaves every minute by default, eh?). Every so often, it will stop displaying some of the annotations on a page, or sometimes it will render the page twice with each page turn. Another example of the nearly-great-except-for-frustrating-flaw category.
For general purpose tablet use, I’m not impressed. The good: Internet Explorer is a surprisingly great tablet browser, MetroMail is a decent app for gmail, and Nextgen Reader is an outstanding RSS reader. For watching videos, there are good apps for Netflix, Hulu, and VLC player, and the kickstand is pretty handy for propping it up anywhere. The pen makes a pretty decent mouse substitute for desktop software. The bad: except for the apps I have mentioned and a handful of others, everything in the Windows store is just terrible.
Then, while the battery life is pretty good, Windows can’t actually manage the battery life like a proper mobile OS. It doesn’t even make it easy to find the remaining battery life! By default, there’s only (1) a little tiny battery icon when you bring up the “charms”, (2) the system tray battery indicator, and (3) warnings that the battery is about to die. Turns out that Metro apps can’t even access system information, including the battery life. There is one app with a workaround: use the task scheduler to repeatedly run a batch file with a command line that writes the battery life to a text file that the app can read.
Finally, the SP3 is too clunky for simple tablet use. Every time I’ve been sitting on the couch idly browsing [del]stupid shit on the internet[/del] the SDMB or playing a game, I set the SP3 aside and use my phone instead. It’s just too big comfortably use and hold, except in portrait mode, where you can cradle it with one arm and hold the pen in the other just like book or pad of paper.
I think I might be happier with the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, the only other big tablet with a good stylus, for “paper replacement” duty, and a more conventional laptop like the Thinkpad X1 running Windows 7. That would be even more staggeringly expensive (north of $2000 for that combo), and I’d have to juggle two devices. On the other hand, the vast majority of users would probably be happy with $500 laptop and/or a $200 tablet.
TL;DR: SP3 hardware is nearly flawless, if you have any desire for a giant tablet, or a laptop that’s not easy to balance on your lap. Windows 8 and the few decent Metro apps add lots of small but frustrating problems.