As mentioned in
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/itshow-2015-368/microsoft-surface-pro-3-a-4999352.html I ordered the SP3 from the MS Store instead of buying it at the IT Show. Turns out it doesn't seem like one then can claim those Sennheiser headphones
http://www.microsoft.com/singapore/promos/termsconditions.html
>> 3) Not valid for end-customer purchases from Microsoft (online) Store.
So if one does want those headphones and can bargain to get a free type cover it's actually cheaper (vs purchasing those headphones separately afterwards) to just stroll down to Challenger/Best Denki/Harvey Norman etc than to purchase it from the MS Store with the 10% student discount (with the student discount one doesn't get those 100 bucks off the type cover).
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Took 3 business days for the SP3 to be delivered from China after purchasing from the MS Store. They ship with DHL and you can track the shipment online.
Was looking for an alternative to the overpriced 73 bucks tempered glass protector but bought it in the end anyway as I heard mixed reviews about 3rd party ones. Installing it is easy, but make sure you wipe off all liquid from the wet wipe.
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Quite happy with the SP3 (i5 with 8 gb ram/256 gb SSD) so far. It's replacing my old quad core Asus 42Jr from 2011. Feels quite much faster than my old laptop which I'm using at "high performance" power plan so it doesn't clock down, and I've replaced its hard drive with a Samsung 840 EVO SSD. CPU performance tests online say that the 4300U is only 23% faster than the 720QM but I feel it's more, even though I've mainly used it on battery and still on the "balanced" power plan. Perhaps the disk in the SP3 is even faster than the Samsung 840 EVO even, but I guess this feeling is primarily cause I haven't installed so much crap on the SP3 yet.
I'm a bit lazy to reformat, so first thing I did was to disable bitlocker and split the c: partition to 2x evenly sized partitions using AOMEI (
http://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html).
I'm almost exclusively using my computer for music production (FL Studio) and my old laptop could hit problems when running a lot of VSTi plugins, especially later in the mixing and mastering stage with a lot of plugins on each channel. While at home I use a dedicated external Focusrite 2i4. My old Asus only lasted 1.5 hours on battery and the 1366x768 resolution is too little for music production, so I've actually not used the battery for 3 years - it's always "docked" to a Dell U2412M and the charger plugged in. The SP3 seems to work quite well using the Asio4All drivers on the on-board realtek sound card so I think producing on the go might actually be feasible now.
Scaling is a bit awkward atm when using the SP3 as a secondary screen with my Dell monitor. Text and icons are very small on the SP3 but huge on the Dell cause of totally different DPI (24" 1900x1200 vs 12" 2160x1440). Haven't googled that much on this problem though.
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This is my first tablet and I've been using the SP3 a bit in bed and the sofa. Quite neat to browse the internet in vertical mode, but I don't enjoy typing on the virtual keyboard. The type cover works very well for me. I do however find the pen worse than the one with my Galaxy Note 3. The surface pen doesn't click very well for me, but maybe I have to double click to click links. For drawings my designer/creative friends were quite impressed with the little time they spent in OneNote though.
HTH
