Yesterday Microsoft held a small press conference with a live-stream to announce to the world their latest Surface product. Popular speculation leading up to the event assumed that Microsoft was going to announce a Surface Mini to compete against Apple’s iPad Mini and the Android powered Nexus 7 from Google. The Surface Pro 3 was not what most people expected although near the end everyone anticipated the news of a Surface with a 12 inch screen. The Surface Pro is now lighter and faster but that’s not the most interesting tid-bit of news from the tablet player most people immediately dismiss.
Announced alongside the new 12 inch Surface Pro 3 was the more tablet friendly release of Photoshop from Adobe optimized for touch in the Windows 8.1 environment and made specifically with the Surface Pro 3 in mind. The artist community is slowly spreading the word about the Surface Pro because it is like an 11inch Cintiq on steroids. With a full blown operating system directly on the device and with a touch or type cover the Surface Pro truly becomes the “everything you want it to be” device. I have a first generation Surface Pro and it’s the perfect for on the go programming, infrastructure repairs, gaming, web browsing, writing and drawing. What the first generation device doesn’t do well though is have a great battery life or make itself easy to hold due to its light weight nature. The second gen device fixed the battery problem but failed to fix the weight issue.
Images from Microsoft.com
The 12 inch Surface Pro 3 will solve many of the complaints made by artists and professionals alike. With a docking station for office work and an improved kickstand that can now move almost flat, the professional and artist will be happy. In addition to those little improvements the battery life is now on par with a typical Android or iOS tablet running on an ARM processor. With the Intel Haswell processor being x86, nearly any piece of software you want to run on a PC will run on the Surface Pro 3 so even though the Windows Store does not have the robust catalog of tablet specific applications that iTunes or Google Play boast, the device is perfectly capable of meeting the needs of users who want to create content as well as consume it.
The Surface Pro 3 is available to pre-order now in several price ranges. The i5 processor flavors are the only ones that will ship in June, for the under-powered economy model with the i3and for the faster i7 processor, early adopters will have to wait until August before they get their hands on a Surface 3. Either way the base i5 model weighs less than the equivalently equipped 11 inch Macbook Air. With Microsoft and Adobe’s partnership to make the Creative Cloud suite more tablet friendly and the base i5 model’s competitive price point with comparable technology, the Surface Pro 3 is sure to continue to make buzz in the artist and professional community. For Microsoft, that growing interest is a win because as Microsoft is usually the market leader in the professional community, they’ve always had a hard time finding fans in the artistic community.