Thanks to guest poster Ef Jay (@efjay01) we’ve got an owner review of the Asus Vivo Tab, the Clovertrail based Windows 8 Tablet.
The Asus Vivo Tab is another entrant in the Clovertrail-powered range of Windows 8 hybrid tablet devices designed to offer an experience that covers productivity use with “legacy inch Windows 7 x86 programs and the new Modern style apps from the Windows store while offering the long battery life advantages of ARM devices. I’ve been using it for over a month and here is my review.
LG have teased a new slider Windows 8 touchscreen convertible, the H160, that comes in at 1.06KG, a weight where an 11.6 inch multitouch slider could start to be useful. LG haven’t given specifications but given the weight and the claimed 10hrs of battery life, we’re confident that this will be Clover-Trail based.
You know what’s coming? The biggest personal computing fight, ever.
Windows 8 and the expansion of the laptop into smartbook territory will go head to head with an important launch in the handheld computing space the iPad Mini. Following that, Windows Phone 8 and a non-desktop Windows tablet, Microsoft Surface with Windows RT, will start shipping. There has never been a month in history where the personal computer has had such an upheaval. No-one really knows what’s going to happen.
Some of these products could fail showing us again that what people want is not always what the manufacturers think. Touch-enabled sliding and convertible Ultrabooks is one of those risk areas. Windows RT, I believe, is another, at least for the time being but I think there’s a product category that has fantastic change. The SmartPC, Smartbook could finally succeed with Windows 8 on Intel Atom.
I really liked the look of the HP Env X2 I tested at IDF 2012. The size and weight proportions are more conducive to mobile operations than some of the Core-based solutions and in addition, there’s a battery life advantage to be had over Core but it’s not quite up to replacing a desktop for most people so there’s a big trade-off. The ASUS Vivo Tab is the same, but looks even better!
I got hands-on at IDF and you can see that in the video below. I walked away very impressed and definitely interested in testing it further, especially as I’m a huge fan of ultra-mobile solutions.
Just how long have we been waiting for a low-power productive computing platform and an operation system built to go with it? Atom has been around (largely unchanged in it’s CPU architecture) for many years but we’ve been through Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 before the OS finally matured to support touch, pen and mouse computing. UMPC’s won’t be coming soon but if the convertible Windows 8 devices do well, there’s a chance that the screen-sizes will drop.
Last week at IDF I took a look at a few of the convertibles and spent a lot of time learning about the platform and analyzing what could be possible.
