Surface 3 for travel

[smunro622]

i do a lot of traveling and i am looking for a laptop to watch movies, i used to use my lumia 1520 but that died.
Does surface 3 have the horse power to play mkv files? i have tried other atom powered notebooks (winbook tw800 series) and i was not impressed.
I like the surface 3 pro from a previous employer, but not going to spend $1,500 for a movie player.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

This gen of atom processors are very capable I play 1080 p mic files no problem


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[DLCPhototography]

Watching Movies while traveling is one function I bought my S3 for, and it works perfectly for this.

I had made an HD MKV file from my IRobot BluRay, put it on a MicroSD card in the S3, and the S3 plays it natively, without difficulty.

I also watch Netflix without problem. And just a few days ago, I bought a Sling M1 for my home TV/DVR, and with the Sling Desktop Player, and a decent WiFi connection, I can now watch anything on my home TV, including shows already recorded on my DVR. Works wonderfully (the only limiting factor is my home's TWC connection being only 1mbps up, but this is supposed to change within a month to 5mbps up).

The size and weight make it, for me, much more usable as a Tablet than the Surface Pro 3, and it costs considerably less.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with my S3.

 

[P_Devil]

The Surface 3 is not the best tablet for you. iPad Air 2 is better in battery.

Bull.

The Surface 3 can easily handle 1080p mpeg-4 AVC files (your MKV file likely houses an AVC/h.264 video) with stereo, surround sound, and lossless surround sound. I can even smoothly playback 4K videos when using the right program. Battery life when playing back videos is going to be about the same as the iPad Air 2. You just have to use the right program that allows for direct hardware decoding of the videos. The Xbox Movie app does this and you can even make VLC do it as well. Playing videos back in Chrome won't though as Chrome purely relies on Software decoding. You can playback a 1080p video without issues but it will eat a large portion of the battery, forget about 4K video playback in Chrome.

If anything, the Surface 3's larger display, same battery life, and extreme flexibility (you can playback videos on a USB device, the memory card, online streaming services, online cloud services, etc.) make it a better video playback device than an iPad Air 2. Granted, it's overkill if you are just looking for a portable video player but so is an iPad Air 2. There are plenty of less expensive Android tablets with similar screen sizes that would be better if all you are looking for is video playback.

 

[smunro622]

thanks everyone i ended up getting a surface 3, and i love it. bought an extra 128 gig sd card, i now have everything i need at this point.
might try some basic photo editing with it and see how that goes.

 

[Boss Fight]

My wife has a MacBook Pro. She got a Surface 3 to run Visual Studio on. It can definitely handle some HD video.