First Bay Trail Windows 8.1 Convertible To Start At $349

crookedvulture writes "Bay Trail has its first convertible design win. Intel's newest SoC will be available in Asus' Transformer Book T100, which combines a 10.1" Windows 8.1 tablet with a keyboard dock that includes a gesture-friendly touchpad and USB 3.0 connectivity. The tablet is powered by an Atom Z3740 processor with quad cores clocked at up to 1.8GHz—600MHz slower than the Z3770 chip benchmarked by the press. The screen has a relatively low 1366x768 resolution, but at least the IPS panel delivers wide viewing angles. Asus clearly intends the T100 to be an entry level device; the 32GB version is slated to sell for just $349, and the 64GB one will cost only 50 bucks more. Those prices include the keyboard dock and a copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013. They also bring Windows 8 convertibles down to truly budget territory, completing the collision between tablets and netbooks."

gesture friendly touchpad?

[Qzukk]

Does a "gesture friendly touchpad" mean its one of those completely flat surfaces with no edges that randomly make shit flip down/out/over what I'm trying to work on because there's no way to tell when you're moving the pointer and when you're swiping the charms bar?

Or does it mean one where the damn gestures are turned off by default without having to install synaptic drivers and dig through their driver menus, or hunt around in the registry, or say fuck it and replace windows entirely [makeuseof.com]?

who voted for this Slashvertisement?

[Gravis Zero]

seriously, everyone who voted for this "article" needs a spanking.

Meh? Really?

[snookerdoodle]

Ok, I don't get the "meh" posts. Touchscreen. Keyboard. $400 for 64 gb version. Real Windows (i.e.: Windows 8.1, not RT).

This is a pretty nice computer at a very nice price.

Re:Meh? Really?

[UnknowingFool]

Well most here are thinking that it's not an iPad or Android killer. They are probably right. It's a Surface RT killer.

Re:one big flaw though

[UnknowingFool]

Metro/Modern is actually a decent UI for tablets. The desktop is where it sucks. Maybe Win 9 will have a dual UI mode as 8.1 doesn't seem to fix this gap.

This is what the Surface RT should have been

[emblemparade]

I'll repeat my title: this is what the Surface RT should have been. I would be happy to trade in my netbook + Nexus 10 tablet for one of these. And the price is very right, especially as it includes basic MS Office capability.

The Windows 8 interface is perfectly fine for a tablet. Worse in some ways than Android, better than others. The real advantage over Android is that you have a full web browser, none of those dumbed-down mobile versions that can't handle standard web sites. If you're really wedded to the Android app-world it's probably not so good for you, but remember that there's so much free Windows software that would do the job just fine. Android has been wanting full VLC and smoothly working Flash for years...

And as a netbook, it's the real deal. You can install *any* Windows software on it, unlike the Surface RT. And Bay Trail makes it that much more capable that the netbooks of old, that cost about the same, couldn't turn into tablets, etc.

People complaining about this being "slashvertisement" need to chill. This is news for nerds: a new category of consumer device that could really shake things up.

Re:Meh? Really?

[timeOday]

I don't get it, how is this not an iPad killer? For $429, you could get a 32 GB iPad mini with a 7.9" 1024x768 screen and no MicroSD slot and no keyboard. Or for $30 less, you could get a 64 G transformer with a 10.1" 1366x768 screen, a MicroSD slot, and a keyboard, that can serve as a tablet, or run any PC application out there. Seems pretty "killer" to me.

Re:one big flaw though

[0123456]

But you don't have to actually use Metro to get things done. The normal desktop is still there, and if you start typing in Metro, then what you are looking for quickly pops up in a search result.

If I wanted to type to run programs, I wouldn't be using a fscking GUI.

Re:Why won't 'HD' just hurry up and die?

[wiredlogic]

15 years ago I was rolling with 1600x1200 on a monitor capable of even higher resolution than that. Now you have to pay premium coin just to get a modest improvement on that vertical resolution.

Re:Seems Pricey

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Or they could have tried to get Visual Studio to leverage LLVM and ship bitcode so things could be ever further future-proofed and extend to more than just 2 architectures."

That's the humorous part of all this: Microsoft started work (more than a decade ago, if I recall) on the 'Common Language Runtime' and the 'Common Language Infrastructure', with the 'Common Intermediate Language' playing the part of architecture-independent bytecode representation. It's ostensibly a standard and whatnot; but basically Microsoft's ".NET" is the serious implementation.

The already have, in house, widely used, supported by their dev tools, an architecture independent mechanism. Loads of ISVs even use it fairly extensively.

Architecturally, they might actually have the best position among any major vendor to make cross-platform binaries happen; but they threw it all away to try to have a mandatory app store. Elegant, really.