I was very sad to read news on Friday that Lenovo was getting out of the small screen tablet market. It turns out, however, that it’s not true. Lenovo issued a press release yesterday stating that they  “are not getting out of the small-screen Windows tablet business.” In addition to that they stated that they will have a new 8-inch and a new 10-inch Windows tablet ready for the holidays. This is great news because it supports my theory that 8-inch Windows tablets haven’t done badly at all. While I […]

I recently wrote about what a late-2014 high-end 8-inch Windows tablet could offer. I talked about Intel’s Realsense camera technology, 3G, USB3.1, 1080p screens and AC WiFi. A digitizer and additional access security could be interesting too but is there a market for these high-end features in the 8-inch sector? Could Microsoft create a market with a Surface Mini and a really special technical feature?

What a pleasure it was to test and review the Acer Aspire Switch 10 for Notebookcheck.net over the last three weeks.  The Acer Aspire Switch 10 is a low-cost 2-in-1 that’s up against a product that has been selling like hot-cakes and yet it pulls through. It’s cheap and capable and it’s a great showcase for Windows 8 and Intel’s Baytrail-T processor

There are three things I check when I quickly evaluate new 2-in-1 announcements. Price, performance (CPU, disk, screen) and weight. If the tablet is over 1KG a big buzzer goes off in my head. This 13-inch Satellite Click 2 Pro P30W however has got me inquisitive. 13.3-inches in 1.05KG (2.3 pounds) on an Ultrabook platform makes it quite interesting.

It’s with a Nokia 808 in-hand that I decided to kill an hour at the port of Dunkirk in France recently. It’s a grim place. The petro and chemical industry, the lorry parks, old rail infrastructure and the grime caused by the transport of 29 million tonnes of freight per year and 13 million tonnes of roll-on-roll-off vehicles. 2.5 million passengers pass through that part of the port every year and most of those go via the DFDS (was Norfolk Lines) ferry that runs every 2 hours to Dover. Nearly […]

As the Ultrabook design philosophy reaches more of the mainstream laptop market it is becoming more and more difficult to spot new advances in laptop design. NEC makes it easy for us though by launching the sub 800-gram (1.76 pound) LaVie GZ. Energy and space-saving IGZO screen and mainboard means less layers to the laptop cake. There’s a trade-off though.

I have a history of testing simple, fast and efficient video editing software and two years ago I settled on an Intel platform with Quick Sync hardware. Quick Sync is simply a hardware acceleration layer for video encoding and processing and it works extremely well on Ultrabooks. It also works on Clovertrail and Baytrail-T Windows 8 tablets and 2-in-1s (also a few Baytrail-M processors) but the problem there is that the desktop applications are just a bit too heavyweight. I’ve tested a number of Windows 8 ‘RT’ apps but it […]

I’m testing the Acer Aspire Switch 10 for Notebookcheck.net right now and it’s going well. I prefer it to the ASUS Transformer Book T100 because of the better keyboard, mouse and screen but there’s one little issue – battery life. The Switch 10 has a 24Wh battery inside which is much less than the 34Wh battery of the ASUS T100 and less than half of what you got on the previous W510. Looking at the keyboard reveals that it’s quite light and has 8 exposed screws so naturally I took […]