Looking for suggestions on buying a Surface

liuwenqiang

Hi everyone,
I started to use Zotero recently and I found Zotero is amazing to organize the references.
I want to buy a tablet or something equivalent in order to read and annotate the PDF files because the place to do so is more flexible. I found two or three discussions in the forum, it seems the best choice is to buy a Surface since it runs Windows 10. However, I am not sure which kind of Surface to buy since there are various kinds of them including Surface, Surface Pro, Surface Laptop. The main purpose is to use it to run Zotero and PDF X-change Viewer as I do it on my PC, so I want to spend as less money as possible.
Could you please tell me which Surface should I buy? If tablets of any other brands are good enough, I would like to consider them as well. Please advice me.
Any help would be much appreciated!

emilianoeheyns

https://www.reddit.com/r/SuggestALaptop/

Gurdas_Sandhu

I have been on Surface Pro for past four years now (and very happy with it). If you intend to get one device to do it all, then the Surface Pro is unbeatable. However, if you will continue to use another laptop/desktop as your main computer and need a tablet just for reading/annotating PDFs, then, the Surface Pro might be a bit of an overkill. But still, based on your appetite for risk, you can get excellent prices on Surface Pro from local Craigslist seller (still need to apply all common sense Craigslist precautions). A Surface Pro 3 or newer is good and you can get a Surface Pro 3 with i5/256GB/8GB for ~$400, a Surface Pro 4 with same specs for less than $600.

So, if not Surface Pro then what? I would say about any Windows tablet would be okay if all you want to do is read/annotate PDFs. Options 2 and 3 on this list look good:
https://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/windows-8-tablets-release-date-specs-and-prices-916134

Tip: If you are going to spend a lot of time annotating PDFs, consider Drawboard PDF:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/drawboard-pdf/9wzdncrfhwqt

liuwenqiang

Thanks for all the answers!
And thank you very much gurdas! That is very detailed suggestions and helps me a lot!
Following your advice, I think Surface Pro 3 definitely is my first choice. I also found that Samsung Galaxy TabPro S is another good choice since it seems it is a little cheaper than Surface Pro. I would like to buy a second-hand tablet of any of them.