who's NOT upgrading to sp3?

[jrapdx]

Well, time for me to confess that I bought an SP3 and on launch day. But tonight I took it back to BB. My gripes, in no particular order:

* not even closer to 9 hours of battery life....

* weird software and hardware glitches ...

* the pen storage is worse than sp2 ...

I did love the thinness and lightness ...

Last month I considered getting the SP3, but such comments seem to be frequently made. The CPU "throttling" would be a disadvantage for my use: generally I'm running plugged in and with High Performance profile.

I decided to pass on the SP3. When should we expect the SP4 to show up?

 

[stranger4all]

Just got my SP2 in may this year with the 4300 cpu , have been using it as a complete replacement to my office laptop , love the size which makes it highly portable and easy to carry from one meeting to another without caring a bag , just like a diary !

I really love the thinness of the SP3 and the unlimited angles on the kick stand but the cost of the SP2 was too high to change it soo quickly ! and i would prefer the 10inch size over the 12inch any day. its more portable and easy to handle .

at a time 128Gb was too less so i added an extra 64Gb card, now the space is enough for my use.

waiting for a SP4 hopefully they can make it more thinner and smaller as well.

 

[jollywombat]

Last month I considered getting the SP3, but such comments seem to be frequently made. The CPU "throttling" would be a disadvantage for my use: generally I'm running plugged in and with High Performance profile.

I decided to pass on the SP3. When should we expect the SP4 to show up?

At this rate, maybe in five months?

 

[horseflesh]

At first, I was on the bubble. I wasn't going to upgrade and take a big financial hit, but if there was a generous trade-in program, as rumored, I thought I would do it. As it happens the trade-in program didn't happen and in retrospect I am glad due to the problems we have been reading about.

Currently, I am in the "no way" camp. My SP2 works well enough and I do not covet the SP3 large screen enough to take the financial hit and endure the current raft of issues.

That said, I am really enjoying using my SP2 for things like books, comics, magazines, offline YouTube, and similar content. The SP3's superior screen would make this stuff even better. I could see, maybe, upgrading down the way, or picking up the cheapest possible i3 version just for media (and OneNote).

 

[mtalinm]

and while we're at it, the type cover 1 >> type cover 2. I know the latter is thinner and has backlighting. but TC1 is much, much better for typing.

 

[kodos]

Okay, I recant my earlier statement about waiting. I picked up a SP3 / 256GB / 8GB / i5 last night at BestBuy. My biggest concern right now is battery life. Battery Bar is telling me to expect no more than 5.5 hours right now on a full charge. That makes no sense to me. With similar CPU usage (almost 0%), and the same brightness level, my SP2 could get almost 7 hours. With the Power Cover, it would get about 12 hours - a really nice thing when I was out all day. This is a real concern for me.

Other than that, I LOVE this thing. It is amazing - the best machine I've ever owned, bar none. That includes a Retina Macbook Pro (15") I sold last year. What a pleasure to use this machine.

But the battery. That is a concern.

 

[jrapdx]

,,,
Battery Bar is telling me to expect no more than 5.5 hours right now on a full charge. That makes no sense to me. With similar CPU usage (almost 0%), and the same brightness level, my SP2 could get almost 7 hours. With the Power Cover, it would get about 12 hours - a really nice thing when I was out all day. This is a real concern for me.

...

But the battery. That is a concern.

That is surprising. Tests of SP3 vs. SP2 show more or less the same battery life depending on workload. OTOH CPU throttling would presumably reduce power use, which should favor a longer battery life in the SP3.

Are you sure it's fully charged? Instructions usually say to first charge the battery for 12 hr or so before the device is used.

Otherwise, wouldn't we expect a new battery to be at the top of its game? Could it be your SP3 was built with a bad battery? You may need to take it back to find out if that's the problem...

 

[kodos]

That is surprising. Tests of SP3 vs. SP2 show more or less the same battery life depending on workload. OTOH CPU throttling would presumably reduce power use, which should favor a longer battery life in the SP3.

Are you sure it's fully charged? Instructions usually say to first charge the battery for 12 hr or so before the device is used.

Otherwise, wouldn't we expect a new battery to be at the top of its game? Could it be your SP3 was built with a bad battery? You may need to take it back to find out if that's the problem...

It was Day 1 - so maybe the battery wasn't fully charged. I will say that the device struggled to charge the battery with all of the indexing, app installation, etc. going on - so maybe the battery wasn't at 100%. I'll do some more testing while I'm in the 15 day window. The big test comes on Monday when I go to work with it. If it can last a full day at work, then I'll be happy. Otherwise, it goes back. The Power Cover was awesome on the SP2. I could be at work all day, and come back home and use it as a tablet and when I was ready to go to bed I still had many hours left. I don't think the SP3 will live up to that rigor.

Are there plans for a Power Cover 2 for this thing? I'd love to have one even though it wrecks the 'lightness', but that's okay, I can rip it off or on depending on how I want to use it. I also liked the Power Cover's rigidity when I was using it as a mobile workstation. I miss that, even though the Type Cover 3 is a major improvement in other areas (such as angle, and trackpad)

 

[mtalinm]

Has anyone gotten power cover to really work with SP3? I don't think so. Another lie from PanosPanay. Please tell me I'm wrong.l

 

[jrapdx]

It was Day 1 - so maybe the battery wasn't fully charged. I will say that the device struggled to charge the battery with all of the indexing, app installation, etc. going on - so maybe the battery wasn't at 100%. I'll do some more testing while I'm in the 15 day window. The big test comes on Monday when I go to work with it. If it can last a full day at work, then I'll be happy. Otherwise, it goes back. The Power Cover was awesome on the SP2. I could be at work all day, and come back home and use it as a tablet and when I was ready to go to bed I still had many hours left. I don't think the SP3 will live up to that rigor.
...

So I'm curious: now that you've had it a few days, is your SP3 still showing a short battery run time? More important, does it really have a short run time? IOW, real-life measurement of the run time under your use conditions is the "facts on the ground" that matters.

Don't know if it works the same way as the SP2: the OS will gives "0:00" hrs when the computer is plugged in/charging. Unplugging it, the OS takes several minutes before the OS begins to return its estimate of the remaining time on battery. The slowness is annoying, but worse, I don't think it's all that good a predictor of actual wall time the SP2/3 will run.

On my SP2, after I unplugged it ~30 min ago, the OS said I had "6h:08m 96%" remaining battery life and successively reported "7:33 93%", "6:23 92%", "7:42 91%". It's a case where your mileage really will vary...

A few months ago I wrote a little utility, a handy readout of battery status. (It's a standalone exe in TclTk using the TWAPI extension--a very capable set of tools to learn to use.) Anyway, I'll put it on the web for download (with source) if it would be useful.

 

[kodos]

After a full day of usage, it is now reporting up to 11 hours of runtime left. I've not pushed it yet, since I've not had a full day of work yet. But so far, it seems like I can get about 7 hours based on my usage. So it has gotten better indeed. Thanks, everyone!

 

[callihan_44]

Ive decided to wait and see what broadwell will bring to the table, my sp2 gets the job done for me