need to get organised with emails - surface pro best option?

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

unwashed potato!

Soldato
Joined
12 Feb 2006
Posts
17,639
Location
Surrey
i'm asking in here as i feel it's probably the best place to get advice on this as it's some what a windows related question.

in the busy periods like i am going through now i get very little time to be sat at my desk dealing with emails/bookings throughout the day as i'm out and about woking at various sites. i have my android mobile with me, and i do own a 10" samsung tablet, however i've always found dealing with emails a pain on mobile as not only do i have less features (saved responses, searching through emails) but also getting info from say a web page pasting that link in the email, or adding various figures on the calendar, or copying emails to my google calendar, when i need snippets from various emails on android not having a mouse to drag drop select etc, this is much harder to do on android then on a desktop pc and takes 3/4 times as long if not more

i'm considering getting something like a surface pro. nothing too fancy as it'd pretty much just be used for emails and viewing my calendar. I had a surface pro 2 before, and it was a bit heavy, and on the downside i found it not as easy to quickly view things like my google calendar, having to load up chrome, then go to the website, the boxes on the web page are not well designed for a tablet screen, unlike the android apps which have the calendar info clearly there for you, one click of the address and it loads the maps to direct you there etc.

before i go sell my samsung tablet and buy a surface, is there any suggestions as to how i can get better organised with emails with the stuff i've already got?

If peopel feel a windows tablet would work, any suggestions?
 
A Surface Pro, even the low-end one, will do you very nicely for what you describe. They're also great for meetings as they're wonderful for whiteboarding things on using Lync or even just scribbling rapid notes in OneNote. A stylus is a great thing. For emails, you can run full Outlook on them and that's one of the best ways of managing emails once you have all the message filters you want set up, etc. Although it still can't play animated GIFs in an email so it's a bit crap in that regard.

Note, the new Surface 3, unlike the Surface RT and Surface 2 predecessors, runs x86 Windows. So if you want to cut costs, that's a workable option for your use case now. Though honestly, the Surface Pro is such a wonderful device, it's hard not to get that one.

Surface Pro with an O365 subscription (that lets you download the Office suite) is a killer combination for the mobile manager or equivalent. OneNote with a stylus is a very liberating experience. Especially when you learn all the little tricks with it.

Plus, the first time you use Edge's in-built mark-up tools to annotate a web-page it will absolutely blow your colleagues' minds. Admittedly I use it mainly for circling people's mistakes in red and sending it to them, but it can be amazing if it suits your job.

Seriously, if you have the money for it, a Surface Pro is a phenomenal device for organizing yourself on the go. There are rumoured to be refreshes in October (++RUMOUR++) so you might conceivably want to wait. Though if they do appear I don't expect anything radically different - mainly a better battery life. Resolution is already good on the Pro, imo.
 
thanks for the reply.

so what's the difference between surface 3, and surface pro 4? i previously had a surface pro 2, but there was a surface 2 at the time. the differences being pro was full windows. is surface 3 still full windows?

from what i can see, surface pro 4 doesn't have a 4G LTE option?
 
I used a sp1 for a while and although I agree stylus was great/wonderous for taking notes, the mechanism for copy/paste and drag and drop using the stylus , I found less easy, and ultimately used a bluetooth apple magic mouse ( at that time I had not discovered the touchmousepointer windows app that I now use on lesser tablets which is a god send)
(I did not look for online references that describe stylus commands, but you can probably find them)
I think MS still have an option to return if you are not happy and that was what I did (but with the bigger screen the new versions are I imagine much nicer, with stylus improvements too - but it was already class leading)
 
Surface 3 does run full windows home although it is the less power full atom chip, I would grab the core m3 pro if budget allows but the standard surface 3 would probably manage just email and calendar fine.
 
with student discounts i can get surface pro 4 m3 version for £674.10 incl. VAT plus £50 off ms store so could get a keyboard or pen for fairly cheap. tempting, but from what i can tell, no pro 4 have 4G connection, which is such a shame as i don't want to have to be dealing with constantly enableing wifi hot spot on my phone, then have it download latest happenings of emails. i want it ready to go for when a customer rings the device has all the info i need.

the surface 3 have 4G connection, but seem to be a smaller screen?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom