Acer E11 and Acer CB3. Both $200 laptops.

I bought an Acer E11 Windows laptop. It’s pretty much an Acer C3 Chromebook running Windows. Same N2840 CPU. Same 2GB of RAM. Same 32GB eMMC SSD. Same weight and sizing. Over the last two days I’ve tested it hard and now have my first set of thoughts about the Windows vs Chromebook experience. I’ll go deeper into this topic over time and add videos and long-term thoughts as my experience grows but I wanted to get thoughts out there as soon as possible to help people in the run up to holiday-season buying. This could be one of the most interesting market fights we’ve seen since Android and IOS. Chromebooks and the new wave of Windows netbooks fit different user types, but do the potential customers know that?

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I can’t get the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 8 off my mind.

What has the Surface Pro 3, the Flex 10 and the Samsung Q1u got in common? A stand! The Lenovo Yoga tablet 2 8 (and 10-inch) has a stand too and at under 1 pound / 426 grams it’s the lightest self-standing PC in the world. That makes it interesting for me, especially as it’s got a 1920×1200 screen, a big battery, an LTE option and a starting price of just $299 (dual-band WiFi version.) According to a retailer in Germany that has it up for pre-order there’s a digital compass and GPS. This is too good. I hope not though because I’ve just ordered it. I’m expecting an early November delivery.

Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 8 specs and more information.

The other interesting aspect here is the battery. This isn’t the lightest 8-inch Windows PC because it’s got a huge 24Wh battery inside. In comparison to the Lenovo Miix 2 8, which is one of the lightest, it’s got 35% more capacity. [The capacity is quoted at 6500 mAh. We can assume that it’s based on a 3.7V battery. Anything else would be too much for this weight.]

Take a look at some of the images and imagine the use cases here. Bluetooth keyboard, kitchen, seat-back, car, armchair…

Wolfson® Master HiFi™ audio processing and Dolby® surround sound

Don’t forget that Lenovo are touting good speakers too so the Yoga Tablet 2 8 could end up being your hotel-room best friend.

The camera could be the best camera yet on a Windows tablet…8MP rear camera with f2.2 wide-aperture lens, advanced glare-reducing glass and a BSI 2 sensor.

Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 8 (Windows) issues.

Here are the trade-offs you’ll have to consider. 1) It’s not the lightest. The Dell Venue 8 Pro remains the best ‘reader’ Windows tablet on the market. 2) The stand/battery might improve the portrait reading experience but it might cause problems when thumb-typing. 3) There’s no HDMI port. You’ll get Miracast for video-mirroring but it’s not good enough for an interactive experience in my opinion. DisplayLink over USB 2.0 works for basic office use though. 4) The SoC isn’t going to be any more powerful than those of the first-generation Baytrail tablets although there’s a possibility that the eMMC could be faster as it is on the Toshiba Encore 2 8 tablet. 5) Still no USB 3.0 and the charge+data issue remains. There may be hacks for the latter issue.

If you’re not feeling it for the Yoga tablet 2 yet, take a look at this video from Mobilegeeks. I’ll add more to this playlist.

4 weeks to wait for my hands-on. Can you wait that long or are you pre-ordering?

Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 8 specs and information in our database here.

At IFA in Berlin this week I had a chance to talk to host Nicole Scott about low-cost notebooks. We’ve been podcasting together for years so it was a relaxed 30 minutes where we covered a lot of ground. We talk about the ASUS EeeBook X205, the $200 Windows notebook launched at IFA, and we cover Chromebooks as an alternative. What are the problems? Who’s buying them? Like many people I’m sitting on the fence right now and assessing both Windows (see my other site, UMPCPortal) and Chromebooks and waiting to see what happens when Google offer the first ported Android applications.

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Looking for a sub $200 Tablet PC option? The Toshiba WT8 is $193 at Amazon.com today but the newer, lighter Toshiba Encore 2 WT8 is $192. This Windows with Bing PC arrives for testing tomorrow and I’m looking forward to it. What features have been stripped out of this Bing version of Windows? Is the new platform better? Is there significantly more available storage space or is this 1GB RAM limit going to negate any of the potential improvements? With the original Windows 8.1 8-inch tablets also at the $200-$220 mark, why bother with the Encore 2?

Two important things to note about Windows with Bing are that 1) You don’t get an Office Home and Student license and 2) There’s only single language support. The latter may not affect many people (except myself – someone that relies on this for purchasing tablets in Germany and switching them to the English language) and the former is offset by a one Year Office 365 Personal license. You get Ooutlook included in that and you also get, in theory,  1TB of free online storage for the year. There may be other changes too.

There’s a 5.0MP auto-focus rear camera which could be useful if it’s as good as the one on the original WT8, microSD support up to 128GB and stereo speakers. As with the WT8 there’s no HDMI so you’ll need Miracast or DLNA support to stream movies to a bigger screen.

If the Toshiba Encore 2 wants to be a competitor in the western market for tablet PCs it needs to beat the class-leading Dell Venue 8 Pro in features or undercut it by a big margin. This launch price isn’t enough to convince me but if the device checks out in my review for Notebookcheck and the price drops to $175 or less then it could be worth a closer look.

From a mainstream perspective by a user-interface expert sitting at a desktop PC it’s easy to see why Windows 8 Modern got this poor feedback. It’s shockingly different for some people and doesn’t reach the ease-of-use levels of the IOS or Google Android OS. Unfortunately for Modern haters there’s a while to go before you’ll be able to turn that UI off because the Store needs a springboard. Store unification is coming but will only work with two healthy ecosystems.

Modern is helping to grow the big-screen Store through low-cost tablet sales.

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ABI reported last week that ultra-portable PCs accounted for 12% of all notebook shipments in 2013, way short of anything Intel wanted to achieve with the Ultrabook segment. It raises questions as we see marketing efforts for Ultrabooks fall. Is this leading-edge notebook segment ever going to be a big seller? If it has good profit margins does it need to be or are we underestimating the impact that the Ultrabook ‘project’ has had on the wider notebook market?

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In a report by Bloomberg the Acer CEO is said to have blamed early Ultrabook and touchscreen investments as a mistake. Acer had problems in 2013 as share value dropped following poor sales results. “We need to dig ourselves out of a hole.” Jason Chen said.

This is a story that will bounce around a bit today.

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It’s probably more important than the screen – the keyboard – part of the holy trinity of notebook priorites. K-V-M.

I asked the question on Google Plus yesterday – What was your best experience? I got a large number of responses that were fairly varied. That shouldn’t be a surprise as we all type at different angles, weights and with differing requirements for numeric keypads, F&J locating bumps, function keys, pressure, throw, pitch and even noise.

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