Review Microsoft Surface Go 3 review

Oct 9, 2021
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I bought this device and i am totally frustrated. The hardware is fine. I bought the pentium gold model and it is much more speedy then the old surface 3 or surface pro 2. I can multitask open many browser tabs only when opening sites with a lot of pictures (youtube when scrolling fast) i notice a small delay compared to my main machine. But all that stuff is fine. The screen is nice and bright. And the speakers are nice. The weight is okay. Its not as light as an ipad pro 11 but its very close to it. And you can put it in a stance without a case so its worth the trade off.

What frustrates me is the software. The direction microsoft is going with forcing you to do everything from the cloud and thereby giving away all privacy (imagine if your profile gets hacked and they can get all your passwords) as well as all the software bugs and things that just don't work.

First of all you cannot make a user without internet so you cannot use this device until you have internet connection. This is very evil from microsoft. It gave me a lot of problems. Then when i finally have a profile from the cloud. I get the next problem their s mode. At this moment there is a bug in the store so no one can get their machine out of s mode. I tried everything until finally reading the forums that it is hitting people the past 2 days and it is totally microsofts fault. So my machine is locked in s mode until they decide to fix their bug.

I then finally kind of start liking the device again. But then notice basic windows functionality has gone in windows 11. You cannot i repeat you cannot scroll through your offline jpeg photo collection. You can only do so through the cloud pictures. Somehow i got 2 pictures to work with scrolling and the rest was still bad so i have to close each picture to open another one. In windows 10 i dont have this issue. I can scroll through both my cloud pictures and my offline pictures just fine. I tried reinstalling the app, i tried looking for the older windows photo viewer but its totally missing. You get a broken photo's app instead. More broken then the version on windows 10. (i have a big comic collection i cannot read now) and i can swipe it on my phone.

So basically i threw 1000 usd for keyboard, storage, the keyboardcover and a xbox controller and in the end its a broken mess. I am not going to pay for a random app from the microsoft store just to see my comics and pictures. Microsoft should fix their stuff and should make sure the device is friendly for those who like to work and have fun in an online / offline environment. Since this device is my travel companion unlike my desktop i dont even want it to be always connected to the cloud i want it to work offline just as well. And now it almost feels like a 5 year old phone. My 2018 samsung phone feels as snappy and can do more things both online and offline then this device. This will probably be my last ultraportable microsoft device. The oldschool games i could play on the go (offline) are the only last bit of reason i have now to buy such device.

Another issue is that i wanted to replace this on my workspace (shed) out of home. My laptop died so it was perfect i thought. I had a usb c hub for it to connect to my 4k monitor. But i only get it to work at 30 hz at 4k. My laptop used to work at 60hz with that connector. It might not be microsofts doing. But for the basic stuff i need to do office, internet and bookkeeping (online) it is either a worse image or worse refresh rate at the moment.

If microsoft doesnt fix it i'll be reviewing the ipad 12.4 or tab s7 + instead.
 
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