Battery Life

Inside the Surface 3 is a 28 Wh battery, which is fairly average for a tablet of this size. The Surface Pro 3 comes with a significantly larger 42 Wh battery, which is needed for the more ability hungry Intel Haswell CPU and the slightly larger brandish. Despite the Pro 3 coming with a larger bombardment than the Surface 3, Microsoft claims the Surface 3 will concluding an hour longer during video playback (10 hours versus 9 hours).

During my fourth dimension using the Surface 3 over the course of a few weeks, I plant the tablet'due south battery life to be acceptable. While I don't think the Surface three is the sort of device you'll sit and employ for an unabridged mean solar day, I did attain around seven hours of typical usage between charges. This isn't spectacular for a 10-inch grade tablet, where I would like to see at least 10 hours of usage from a full charge, but at the same time I didn't think that seven hours of life was inadequate by whatsoever means.

From our bombardment life benchmarks, the Surface three's battery life was disappointing. For starters, the tablet fell three hours brusque of Microsoft's video playback battery life figure, which indicates the visitor tested with a lower display brightness than I did. It besides performed worse than the other tablets I had tested with, including the similarly-sized Lenovo ThinkPad Helix that features a more than powerful Intel Core One thousand processor. Running one of our older video playback benchmarks showed that the Surface 2 outlasted the Surface 3 likewise, which isn't too surprising considering the Surface 3's performance increase.

In our intensive Wi-Fi browsing benchmark, I was again disappointed with the Surface 3'south results. In this benchmark the Surface three lasted just equally long as the ThinkPad Helix, just fell well short of the Miix 2 8, which is an 8-inch Bay Trail tablet. Getting around 8 hours of battery life in this criterion would accept been a good effect from the Scarlet Trail Cantlet-based Surface 3, considering its size and performance contour, just it disappointingly fell a few hours brusque.

For intensive gaming the Surface three performed decently, but it's unlikely you'll be able to do more than a few hours of consecutive gaming on this tablet without plugging the device into its included 13W micro-USB charger.