Review: Surface Pro 3 Stylus

So after the Surface Pro 3 came back from repair, besides noticing the fan was a bit loud, I also found my stylus could no longer launch OneNote quickly by pressing the purple button on top.

Honestly this feature isn’t all that useful to me—I rarely use this thing for notes—but it’s still a feature, and having a feature not work properly is just uncomfortable to look at. That’s a normal psychological need, not perfectionism.

My first thought was that it needed to be re-paired over Bluetooth, so no matter how many times I pressed that purple button, the Bluetooth device just wouldn’t show up. That’s when I realized: this pen is, broadly speaking, probably out of power.

The Surface Pro 3 takes an AAAA nine-volt… no wait, an AAAA battery. At first I assumed that battery was dead too, but oddly enough the pen still wrote on the screen and erased things just fine—only the button on the back did nothing, and Bluetooth couldn’t find it.

After some frantic searching I found Microsoft’s official documentation. Let me tell you, that document is long-winded and full of filler, and after following that stupid wizard through a few redirects I finally got it: the pen has another set of batteries inside.

For example, unscrew the top of the pen with a screwdriver:

Then you can see the two button cells inside. The battery model is 319; hard to find in physical stores, but no problem on eBay. Replacing them is very simple.

Simply put, the Surface Pro 3 stylus is in two parts: the two button cells at the top control the Bluetooth section, tied to that button that launches OneNote, while the AAAA battery lower down handles the writing pressure sensitivity and so on.

After the replacement, the stylus’s Bluetooth worked normally. Speaking of which, the replacement machine’s screen is way too slippery… it makes my already ugly handwriting even uglier…