Building Microsoft Surface Pro 3 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Building Microsoft Surface Pro 3 [video]

channel9.msdn.com

80 pointsdoczoidberg28 comments

The Surface Pro 3 is really sweet. Main reason: the stylus and high-quality screen.

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!

>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!

Supposedly implementing N-Trig over Wacom allows the device to be thinner. This explains why Microsoft was willing to make the tradeoff. It also explains why most vendors don't use digitizers. I wish they did, but everyone is obsessed with making the thinnest device possible, even at the expense of functionality.

I've pulled apart wacom tablets before and the panes really aren't that thick, you're talking a single layer of flex PCB. I find it difficult to believe that this was the defining reason for them not using it in their hardware. The 8 bits of resolution they ended up with are probably not all ending up being useful either, which sounds like a pretty disappointing user experience.

Problem is Wacom manufactures the PCB and the PCB is actually rather thick because Wacom doesn't use hyper-modern extra thin stuff.

Its just a grid of wires, basically, theres no reason that it HAS to be that thick, just that they've essentially not changed how they've been made for the past decade.

Wacom doesn't think they need to compete in the tablet market vs modern touch digitizers, so they don't bother doing so, even though they'll license/sell it to anyone with enough cash.

Its confusing to me that Microsoft and Wacom couldn't make a deal: I've used Wacom tablets before, hardware wise, its the best pen interface I've ever used; software wise, well, the apps themselves were laggy as fuck, but Microsoft (due to Surface) has been making a huge push to fix that, and there is literally no reason for it to happen anyways, especially if scribbling with a mouse doesn't do the same (its not caused by the driver or the hardware, because Wacom sample apps don't do it).

> Supposedly implementing N-Trig over Wacom allows the device to be thinner

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

That's strange, N-Trig used to be notoriously laggy when compared to Wacom. I guess the technology has come a long way.

There was a Penny Arcade[0] article a year ago talking about the drawing lag. I suppose Microsoft spent/spending quite a significant amount on the implementation.

[0] http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/06/16/surface-pro...

Unless you're some serious super-artist that does massively high res painting and lives in Photoshop or whatever all day, their sensors are fine.

The guy that draws Penny Arcade dicked around with a Surface 3 Pro and now he absolutely loves it and does a lot of art on it. No real issues reported (and any issues hes reported has been fixed quickly by Microsoft, which, well, Microsoft actually fixing issues promptly fills me with a kind of hope that I haven't had in a long long time).

Microsoft kinda feels like... the Google I wish Google was. I'm not sure how to actually describe this. A company that, yes, makes money, but also makes cool shit and I want to throw money at them to keep making cool shit.

As opposed to the post-Gates Balmer era that drove all their products (sans XBox) into the ground. Well, further into the ground. I'm not trying to flame Microsoft here, but Windows 95 is why I converted to Linux on my desktop full time, and Windows 2000 was the only sane Windows in my opinion between Windows 3.1 and Windows 8.x.

My perspective on windows 2000 is somewhat different because I came from NT4. 2000 required a lot more hardware to do basically the same thing. I thought it was a step down.

Microsoft always was awesome on hardware... from keyboards to Xbox and now the surface.

surface would be my killer portable platform of they ever have a mix of the 3 and pro 3... a small screen one with the ram and speed of the pro.

I was appalled by the Samsung Galaxy Note when I tried one. The pen would draw without even being in contact with the screen.

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.

There is no LCD tablet (iPad, Surface etc) that is great to use outdoors.

My Galaxy Note works well; perhaps yours was a defective unit? The Note pen is too small as you found out but it is designed to be fit in the phone so that's a trade-off. However the Galaxy Note is Wacom based are there are many other pens that work with phone. I use a big pen from an old tablet Pc on the Note. The Note series with its Wagon digitizer also has a much higher resolution than the Surface with 1024 pressure levels.

I would buy the Galaxy Note Pro (13") as well but I'm waiting for the Surface Pro 4

I've pretty much found my Note indispensable. The amount of crap I used to drag along to meetings (notebooks, papers, pens, etc.) is down to zero. I've gone through entire days bouncing around meeting to meeting with my portable "office" in my pocket and nothing else. I can't see going back to a non-pen-enabled device any time soon.

Every once in a while I find myself forgetting about the Note and looking for a pad of paper or a pen somewhere (because I don't have any on my desk any more) and slapping myself because I don't need those things anymore.

I've toyed with getting a Note Pro, but it's just too expensive IMHO. If it was down to within $50-100 of the same sized regular tablet I might dive in.

Bonus: killing time with FlipaClip has brought me more fun than I've had since I was 10 years old.

> 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...

It's not the pressure levels that cause me problems with drawing as much as the inaccuracy in slow strokes. You can't do careful drawing with precise strokes, because the moment you slow down it starts to waggle around as it interpolates across the screen's grid. Lines bow outward into a faint square pattern.

Here's what happens if you try to draw a set of parallel lines: http://i.imgur.com/NUM64KO.png

I love mine in spite of that, and it works for quick sketches where curve smoothing covers the digitizer inaccuracy. But I wish I could draw on it. Maybe the next iteration will tighten things up.

I really love the discussion about making the friction hinge, it looks really cool, though I think over engineered. I think the most elegant friction hinge design I have ever seen was on my Panasonic CF-73. It's almost 14 years old now, used every day for at least 10 of those years, and I still use it time to time, and the hinge works perfect!

Here is an image of it: http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m8yCFI6LbAmeo1QDFT4iT...

Simple, stupid, works :) Though for the surface, there is a requirement to make easy to open at first, first 20 degrees or so, which requires complexity.

Did somebody already install Linux on it? I think my next laptop will either be a MacBook 12 inch or whatever this new very light apple laptop is called. Or a Surface 3. I just need to be sure it runs Linux.

Surface can run Linux since Surface 1.

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.

You won't want to do that without Windows 10, enabling Hyper-V before Windows 10 resulted in you loosing connected standby, but with Windows 10 it works great.

Connected Standby only works for a couple of Windows Store / Metro Apps though. I don't think that's a big loss...

It also means that your startup resume is slower and such, as you have to do a full sleep instead. Personally I've used the alarm and stuff too.

Hyper-V "replaces" your NIC with a bridge adapter, sorta like how you use br0 that bridges to eth0 on Linux, so that could be the cause of that (ie, Hyper-Vs bridge doesn't know how to speak the connected standby API and pass it through to the real NIC).

I was using Fedora on it for daily software development for a couple of months. Almost everything was working perfectly. I ended up switching to a Dell XPS 13 2015 though. The main issue I had with linux on the SP3 was that I couldn't enter the hard drive password without an external keyboard on boot. (Lots of tips on /r/SurfaceLinux)

There is a subreddit for this, although I'm not sure what the current state-of-the-art is

http://www.reddit.com//r/surfacelinux

Here's a thread specifically about the Surface 3 (non pro)

http://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/35dmup/surface...

So the short answer is that it does not work. Lots of fiddling and they dont even get the native resolution working according to the posts.

That's the Surface 3 (not the Surface Pro 3). Apparently, some distros work on the Pro 3 fairly well (though not without issues).

there is another video about the design of the surface: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2326

Amazing talk! MSFT has done a great job with SP3.

I wish more of these types of videos had transcripts. Frequently I don't have enough time to sit down and watch all of this however if there were a transcript I could quickly scroll through it and find some of the highlights..

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