Most of my friends laughed at me when I bought a Surface 3 (non-pro) in 2015, but I wanted the ability to USB charge off a Power Bank and the built in LTE. It has served me well, but it is getting the time to think about a replacement. I've considered the Surface Pro Commercial but the new Qualcomm always on devices in the Surface style of construction are interesting to me because of the USB, extremely long battery life, and ultra thin. Most of my needs are Office. I have a number of plugins for Word and Outlook. I am a lawyer and have an plugin to put stuff into client files on our practice management system (Clio), another that ties things into West Publishing's legal research system, and a couple of others for file management (e.g. one that deletes listserv and junk mail over X days old, etc). I use a virtual print driver (PDF Factory) build PDF documents on my machine. It allows me to print a series of documents to a common clipboard, drag things into place, delete the pages I don't need and send on my PDF. It runs a bit slow.

This is not my workhorse, but the animal has been pulling more and more because my main machines are Macs and there is always that PC tool that I need/want. Parallels is running on one machine but even with 16 gigs of RAM, my machine is happier with it closed. I

I also run an Android emulator for my Kindle, NY Times, and other apps. I also have an app which makes our practice system a virtual drive on my machine which I use all the time to file stuff. I use it in lieu of Dropbox so we can share most of our client file with our clients. (There is a private directory for drafts and stuff not ready to share).

I love the idea of the long battery life and USB-C. I don't carry a tablet and use the notebook as my tablet as well. I also like the idea that after a year or eighteen months I can just replace the keyboard. It seems that notebook keyboards are the first thing that feels aged.

Office will be directly ported to the Qualcomm chipset. Everything in the Microsoft Store will be recompiled. I can run 32 bit Intel apps (but not 64 on the Qualcomm set), but there is always the pesky question of drivers. I'm sure my personal OneDrive will be accessible, I expect that DropBox will eventually come over (not my concern), but not as sure about Outlook plugins, Word Plugins, or the practice management stuff.

I'm thinking that the Surface in many ways is the safe bet. I'm also considering to weight a year. My machine is not dead, but there are things that slow me down.

I was wondering what people's thoughts were?

Well since no one answered my post and the reviews have started to come out, I decided to answer my own post. I'm going with the Commercial Surface with an i5. While the other machines are intriguing, they seem to be too slow. In Intel emulation, the machine is slower than an Atom Processor. Also I was disturbed how the 32 bit versions of many of the bench mark applications didn't work with it. It may be a good machine for a student with its all day battery, but I don't think it would suit me. As a lawyer, many of my needs parallel a student. There is a lot of notetaking, SAAS based stuff, and wordprocessing. What I have different, however, is tons of Outlook plugins and Word plugins, a proprietary cloud storage system, and the need to create complex PDFs. I suspect the small utilities I use like PDF Factory would perform glacially, etc.

I've enjoyed my LTE Surface Pro, but my Surface 3 is still on the shelf. I had bought my wife a Surface 3 as well when I saw a good liquidator deal and she has turned me down on upgrading to a Pro. We'll be looking at the GO LTE for her in the fall. I installed the Memu Android virtualization on my machine reskinning it with a Nova Launcher and it works quite well for my Kindle and NY Times apps.

I agree that the Atom on the Surface 3 works better than expected.

I notice the 64GB version uses eMMC storage. This was my main issue with the Surface 3 - the drive was very slow.

The bigger model with 128GB uses SSD.