The device also remained completely cool to the touch, though the back area underneath the camera lens - a spot you're unlikely to touch - got as warm as 97 degrees Fahrenheit after the tablet streamed a video for 15 minutes. Unlike the Surface Pro 3 and many other Windows tablets, the Surface 3 has a completely fanless design, so it remained completely quiet throughout my testing. After switching to the heavy-metal, guitar-centric 'Breaking the Law' by Judas Priest, I could make out a clear separation of sound between instruments on the right and left sides of the tablet. When I listened to Patrice Rushen's disco classic 'Forget Me Nots,' the vocals, percussion and thumping bass sounded rich and textured. While most tablets provide dull, tinny music playback, the Surface 3 offers truly excellent audio that's loud enough to fill a large living room.

The device also supports stylus input from the Surface Pen, a $50 accessory. Throughout testing, the Surface 3's display was extremely responsive to my touches, including pinching to zoom or drawing with all 10 fingers at once (it supports 10-point touch) in Windows Paint. Anytime light reflected off of the glossy panel, my fingerprints obscured the screen content.

I was able to view the screen in direct sunlight, and colors didn't wash out significantly, even at viewing angles wider than 45 degrees. Scoring 407 nits on our light meter, this Microsoft tablet is one of the brightest on the market, eclipsing the tablet category average (341 nits), the iPad Air 2 (368 nits) and the Surface Pro 3 (298 nits). It's also quite accurate, returning a Delta E error rate of 3.1 (Zero is perfect.)

That's 10 percent more than the tablet category average (83.7) and a tad less than the Surface Pro 3 (97 percent) and the iPad Air 2 (100 percent), and way ahead of the Asus Transformer Book T300 Chi (70 percent). According to our tests, the Surface 3 is capable of displaying 99.3 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which means it can show nearly every standard color.

Surface pro 3 keyboard backlight