Preface: I’ve never really had any particular need for a tablet, but it’s not like I have zero use for one either. I do want a tablet. My needs are simple: use it as a reader, browse the web, watch videos, read PDFs, listen to something to fall asleep to at night. That’s it. The tablet I’d been using was a cheap used LG I picked up from OK’s place. I don’t think I ever wrote about it, but for 300 yuan it’s worth the price — it does fine as a video machine. Its biggest problem is the system. It’s an Android tablet, and a Japanese Android tablet at that, packed with all sorts of junk that causes all sorts of problems, whether it’s system updates or app compatibility. For example, I ran into a situation where my proxy app wouldn’t work. If my home network didn’t have a global proxy, this thing really wouldn’t be able to watch YouTube. So I had an idea: why not try using Linux as a tablet? GNOME, for instance, has been criticized for years for having a UI that’s too “touch-oriented” — so if you actually use it as a touch tablet, wouldn’t it be more suitable? Once the idea was there, I got to work.

Another exam came up in the first half of the year, so I’ve been in study mode again lately. I’ve been wanting to try the “all-digital” paperless study thing — reading PDFs, books, and magazines on a tablet. I’d been using a Lenovo Chromebook Duet, but the stylus on that thing is godawful, and the screen aspect ratio isn’t 4:3 either, which feels like a waste. Then I remembered the very chicken-rib Surface Pro 4 I had lying around. It’s got a 3:2 screen and a 12-inch size — just right for reading books and magazines. Let’s look at the basic specs first: CPU: Skylake i5-6300u RAM: 4GB Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD As you can see, here in 2022 a Windows machine with 4GB of RAM is basically unusable. The CPU feels salvageable — ancient, sure, but it’s battle-tested 14nm at this point. The drive is too small and probably needs fixing too. And this thing has been used for who knows how many years, so the battery’s down to about 60% capacity and needs replacing.

The reason for buying this is simple: to replace the old Surface Pro 4. That Surface Pro 4 would overheat badly the moment I opened DingTalk to teach a class, and on top of that the screen would start shaking. Turns out that screen shake is a known defect — “Zhang-chan” actually had to swap machines because of it, while I probably never hit it since I’d never thrown anything “heavy” at the tablet. Anyway, the Surface Pro 4 just couldn’t keep up anymore, so I bought a Surface Pro 8. Spec is i5 + 256GB + 16GB RAM, with the standard keyboard/pen/cover bundle. Double 12 sale, 9998 RMB for the lot. Not a bad price, eh.

Win10 tablets are everywhere now, and honestly the specs aren’t bad. But Sony was already making this kind of device back around 2005. I remember devices like this — at the very least I saw them in Popular Software. Though it was only ads and reviews, because this thing was expensive as hell, and back then even a desktop couldn’t meet the demands of DOOM3, let alone some overpriced, underpowered “crippled laptop.” But as the old saying goes: “The swallows that once nested in the halls of the nobility now fly into the homes of common folk.” Even something that 14 years ago only the rich and flashy could afford has ended up in my hands. Here I need to thank Duan Ye, a proud Hammer phone fan and man of means, for his support. Duan Ye’s passion for gadgets is full of craftsman spirit — born proud!

First I bought an iPhone 8, since Suning had a special deal a while back. You had to pay a deposit, but overall it was much cheaper than the Apple official site… After ordering you wait two days to pay, but once paid it arrives the same day — seems to be picked up from Suning’s local Zhengzhou warehouse. Got it in hand and it just feels small. Really small…

As a handheld, the Surface Pro 3 kept me company for a long while. But eventually the newer Surface Pro 4 came out. Not a huge upgrade, but considering I spend more time with this thing than with my desktop, I figured I should treat myself. So I upgraded. On the whole the two machines aren’t that different. Most of it is a spec bump.

The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft was pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 really shouldn’t be a problem. I bought the regular version of the Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was naturally Pro too. The upgrade itself went smoothly. Just like everyone else: reserved the Windows 10 upgrade, downloaded it ahead of time, upgraded directly. The process was fast, and then I ran into a few problems:

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.

Yesterday — no, actually today — Microsoft released the Windows 10 developer preview. As a half-hearted Microsoft supporter, I couldn’t resist giving it a shot. First I played around with it in a VM, but it felt off. Not satisfying, not happy. So I wanted to try it on real hardware. Commercial OS dev builds are usually somewhat reliable — more reliable than the betas of quite a few Linux distros (no offense) — so on this fine afternoon I upgraded my Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10.

The Dell Venue 8 Pro kept me company for quite a while — probably the electronic device I’ve used most in recent years, second only to my MP3 player. I watched videos on it, browsed the web, played all sorts of visual novels. But as my needs grew, the god-awful performance, the unsatisfying resolution, and the rough build quality started to bother me. So I sold it and picked up a Surface Pro 3. I’d read online that the i3 version’s performance might actually be worse than an Atom, that battery life was bad, and that while the US version was cheaper, the domestic warranty had been cancelled. So I gritted my teeth and bought the China-market i5 128G. Reviews are everywhere online, so I’ll just talk about the stuff that tends to get overlooked.