Surface Team Reddit AMA Wrap Up

Microsoft’s Surface team, led by Panos Panay, has just wrapped up an hour long Reddit Ask Me Anything event where they fielded questions from the public about the Surface 3 which was announced this past Monday.

While there was nothing earth shattering revealed about a future Surface device, although many tried to pry that info out of the team, there was some interesting performance related info and other tidbits.

I also remember following the Surface Pro 3 Reddit AMA last year and they have definitely upped their game. This one resulted in a lot more questions being answered as last year’s event moved a lot slower in that area.

Anyway, let’s run down some of these items of interest for Surface 3:

- LTE versions, due later this year, will have GPS chips in them.

- Supports InstantGo aka Connected Standby.

- Has TPM in the firmware on the SOC (System on a Chip).

- Uses same networking hardware as the Surface Pro 3.

- No current plans for trade-ins of previous Surface devices for Surface 3.

- No additional regions are being added beyond those already announced to receive Surface 3.

- Battery of Surface 3 will give 10 hours of video playback – same stat as Surface 2.

- Performance of Surface 3 is 85% of Surface Pro 3 (i3) in PC Mark 8 Creative Benchmark for video editing.

- Performance for gaming/graphics is 70% of the Surface Pro 3 (i3), in 3D Cloud Gate.

- Performance of eMMC on Surface 3 is 50% of the SSD on Surface Pro 3.

- No virtualization support.

- The kickstand for Surface 3 has three stops and not the continuous one like Surface Pro 3 to optimize size and cost.

- The Atom x7 was chosen over the Intel Core M to keep Surface 3 light and thin but gets great performance with Burst Mode. Allows for good battery life and subsequently keeping the battery small.

- Only one external monitor through the Mini Display Port so no daisy chaining like Surface Pro 3.

- Will run Visual Studio 2013 smoothly.

- CPU does have thermal throttling to manage heat.

- All past covers will work with Surface 3 except the Power Cover will not charge the device. You can still use it just as a keyboard. Thanks Rafael for the confirmation about the Power Cover. The other thing here is those previous covers will not properly cover the screen either.

The entire thread of the AMA can be seen here and includes both answered and unanswered questions.

If you just want to see the answers they gave then use this link to the Surface Team’s Reddit profile. Just click on the context link under the answer to open up that question and answer together. This is the page I use during Reddit AMA’s because the main page can go crazy fast at times.

What do you think? Anything catch your eye during the Reddit AMA?

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