Oh, but the price doesn’t include the essential Type Cover? Well, what’s another $130, right? Oh… and a 3rd party Ethernet-USB dongle? What’s another $30? It turns out the answer to this basic maths problem is $660 USD, and I got my first lesson in what many other reviewers have already pointed out: what appears initially to be a bargain price creeps up quite quickly. Five hundred dollars for this quality? Its magnesium casing and build quality was (and still is) impeccable, blowing the plasticy Acer, Dell, and Lenovo hybrids out of the water. Sleek, silvery, and solid, the Surface 3 attracted me time and time again. I went from shop to shop for days and started to feel that it had been a mistake to sell my T200. I couldn’t justify spending that much money on a machine that sold elsewhere for about $600, so I kept looking.Įverything seemed to be either too big, too small, or too expensive.
The newly released (at that time) Asus UX305 looked to be perfect, except it was selling here (Thailand) for nearly $1000. At the same time, their premium models with higher resolution screens and more horsepower were selling for about twice what I wanted to pay. Acer’s more affordable line of Switch tablets had even lower resolutions than my old T200, not to mention poorer overall design. I did a lot of research before heading to the malls, but the choice wasn’t as easy as I thought.Īs the T200 was about 6 months old by that point I had assumed that Moore’s law would have taken effect and I could get everything that I wanted for the same price- or perhaps even cheaper.
A touchscreen would be nice if I could get one, but it wasn’t required. I’m a teacher who frequently plans lessons on the move, so a low weight and small footprint are always a plus. My priorities were basically to find something with (1) a higher resolution screen, (2) better performance, (3) more storage, and (4) sleeker profile. The tiny 32GB of storage, leaving me with 3GB of free space, wasn’t fantastic either. One of the biggest issues was the WXGA (1366 x 768 px) screen which, when used in tablet mode with the on-screen keyboard, left only about 3 visible lines of text in any word processing programme. The T200, my first 2-in-1 and Windows tablet, was a nice machine, but I found the performance and battery life somewhat middling.
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