Surface Go

Respect for the somewhat obscure Oscar quote. Still one of my all time favourite movies.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/...assroom-pen-chromebook-challenge-devices-2019

 

That's a good start, but where the heck are the ruggedized cases and keyboards? Schools especially at the lower grade levels are just brutal on hardware. Plus I need a rugged case for myself and so far the stuff in the market such as UAG look tough but aren't really...

 

Thanks Bronsky, the Surface Go looks really great. As luck would have it my VP11 7140 SSD died last week. I ended up finding a refurbished Dell Latitude 12 5290 LTE with an 8th Gen i5 and keyboard through a contact. It was over £450 cheaper than buying the equivalent Go with keyboard new so I thought I'd give it a crack. It's a little bit heavier on it's own but still lighter with the keyboard than the 7140 with it's keyboard but still much heavier the the GO. In comparison it's a lot faster than the 7140 and it's great having USB C for charging, but the screen is bigger. The 5290 is probably closer in spec to a Surface Pro 6 so maybe not an option for most people looking at a SG but I thought I'd share. The 5290 doesn't seem to be mentioned much on here so hopefully that isn't because there are major issues with it and that's why it was cheap.

 

1. Anyone tried this with a battery pack? I heard battery life is meh 5 hours max maybe with LTE

2. As I'm not a heavy onenote user, I sort of wonder what applications I'd have left for something like this. Doesn't have educational apps that include built in flashcards/mnemonics for biology classes like an ipad. But it still seems like a neat little thing.

3. The other thought I had was I could use something like this to ink + paste pictures into powerpoint slides to use as flashcards. It seems light enough to be able to easily do this and walk around with it, flipping through flashcards. Though there's no way to narrow down the cards except making a copy of the powerpoint and then (gasp) deleting slides

 

A little heads up about Surface Go and Bluetooth.

I had a BT keyboard attached. I switched it over to use on the iPad Pro for a little while and then going back to the Go I knew I would need to remove it and then re-pair it for a connection. No sweat, done it lots of times, although I think Microsoft's method blow chunks, in iOS it suffice to turn on the pairing on the device and it will be re-connected. Be that as it may, this is probably what happens when you outsource coding to Vietnam, I didn't expect any problems. But when I did a search on the Go and had pairing on the keyboard turned on, nothing showed (and yes, I might look like I have the intellect of a typical blonde, but I had unpaired it with my iPP and turned off the BT radio) but after the attempt the keyboard showed up as paired in Settings --» Device as paired, but alas not connected. And of course you need to pair it again to make it connect. So total rejection by a tiny piece of hardware.

I turned to Answers.Microsoft.com for some help, but all I got was canned responses about first Settings (I had described the whole process in detail) and after pointing out that I had done this five ways back and forward, the next canned response was about doing the whole thing in Control Panel (which I had also done five different times).

I tried explaining that this was most likely some hiccup in the Registry, but running in S mode the OS refused me access (so be careful about choosing S mode, they never said regedit.exe would no longer be available). Despite making clear that I was located in Japan the next canned response was about me calling Microsoft's 1-800 number. They probably don't realize it yet, but in two or three years these support people will be replaced by AI, at least it may be better than AS - Artificial Stupidity.

I have after this connected and re/connected a different BT keyboard from the same maker (they use Microsoft's HID drivers anyway) without any problem. This just solidifies my earlier belief that this is something gone awry in the Registry.

 

I think I'm just so lucky that whenever I have PC issues, I'll just stomped my way to IT & screams "Fix this!" lol

Just kidding. I don't scream; I threaten.

 

You've probably tried this, but my suggestion did fix a similar issue with my BT headphones where if I paired them with my iPhone I couldn't re-pair with the go.

My fix was/is to delete Bluetooth completely from device manager and then reboot. It comes right back and of course that means having to re-pair everything again, but it lasts me about a month or so before it happens again.

Hopefully it might help

 

Did that as well. Twice.

Sent from my SC-01F using Tapatalk

 

Would anyone be willing to test their Surface Go for pwm? If you have an iPhone, basically just need to point the camera at the screen of the Go while your camera is in slow-mo video, and slowly turn the brightness of the Go's display down. You should start to see grey bars running across the screen.

In my continual search for a new PC solution, I'm thinking of getting the SP6 for daily use at home, and the Go for holidays and weekends at my fiancee's place.