Not that it's all that much cheaper, which is the one complaint I have with the Surface 3 that has survived the review process more or less intact. The Surface 3, an Intel-Atom-powered Windows 8 tablet (soon to be Windows 10) with a 10.8-inch screen, costs $699 for a version with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, but that doesn't include the fairly essential Type Cover keyboard ($179.99) or the very desirable Surface Pen ($59.99), and once you factor the accessories in, it's getting dangerously close in price to the lower end of the Surface Pro 3 range, which has been on sale recently at a 10 per cent discount.

There are reasons to go for the Pro model. It has a proper Intel Core processor rather than an Atom processor, it has a bigger, sharper screen and a more advanced kickstand on the back. But it turns out the differences are far less pronounced than you might think or, in my case, hope. And, much as I hate to admit it, some of those different features on the Surface 3 might actually be preferable under certain circumstances. The smaller screen and the slower processor on the Surface 3 give you about two hours of extra battery life, for example, and it's a good deal more portable.

Flexible kickstand

Let's start with the kickstand, one of the main reasons the Surface line of tablets is so terribly good. It's a hinged metal stand on the back, which you pop out when you want to convert the Surface from tablet mode to notebook mode. (You also have to attach the keyboard.)

On the Surface 3 Pro, the kickstand has an infinite number of positions, because of an ingenious spring design in the hinge. On the Surface 3, it has only four positions, counting closed. By all accounts it should be vastly inferior, but in almost a week of using it on my lap, on my desk and on the ground, I never found a scenario where the kickstand bothered me like I had expected. It's great, despite its technical inferiority.

Graphic

The same is true of the screen. Its has a lower resolution than that of the Surface Pro 3 (1920 x 1280 pixels for the 3 versus 2160 x 1440 for the Pro 3) but once you factor in the smaller size (10.8 inches versus 12 inches), the two screens are very similar in sharpness (213 pixels per inch, versus 216), and I couldn't see a difference, even with my glasses on. And I wore those glasses a lot, just so I could see the hate.

The smaller physical size of the screen is less noticeable than I hoped, and though 10.8 inches is getting dangerously close to that Windows 8 no-man's land, where it's too big for tablet mode and too small for desktop mode, the sharp screen keeps it safely in the desktop mode zone. It's not a huge physical desktop, but the resolution allows you to fit enough stuff on it so you don't go nuts.

The same goes for the processor. It shows up as quite a lot slower in our benchmarks, and when I operated it side-by-side with the Surface Pro 3 it was noticeably slower for operations such as opening large zip files, but most of the time it didn't even occur to me that it was slow. As was true more generally with the Surface 3, I completely forgot that I was supposed to hate it.

Which makes me hate it all the more.