Microsoft Surface 3 review

Another impressive feat of industrial design in the keyboard is the backlight, adjustable using a keyboard shortcut. Few laptops at the price have keyboard backlights, a sign that with the Surface 3, a buyer benefits from higher-end features that have dripped down to entry-level.

Display

The screen is another good example of this. The Surface 3's display is 10.8 inches across and 1,920 x 1,280 pixels in resolution. This is the 3:2 equivalent of 1080p, and gets the tablet very good, if not quite iPad Air-grade, sharpness.

This is easiest' resolution Microsoft could have chosen too. Higher-resolution QHD-or-greater Windows laptops and tablets often suffer from scaling issues, Windows 8.1 doesn't deal with the problem as elegantly as OS X. Every application will have been made with 1080p screens in mind, largely sidestepping the issue.

While the tablet is not designed to accept all that many non-native resolutions at full screen, it will handle 1080p fullscreen apps perfectly well. In this instance, the Surface 3 simply puts small black bars above and below the screen area.