First Bay Trail Windows 8.1 Convertible To Start At $349 151
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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]?
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Nothing too exceptional. (Score:2)
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Another windows 8 tablet. Quad core 1.8GHz, 1366x768 resolution. Lame.
FTFY
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But does it have more space than a nomad?
Gen 1 Nomad had 64 MB (Score:2)
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I don't know, how much time does it take for Captain Kirk to talk it into exploding?
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I have 1920x1080 on a 15.4 screen and it seems perfect for a laptop.
1366x768 at 10.1 is actually a higher DPI count but then you're lacking real estate.
The price seems right though for what you're getting. I'd just prefer to pay a little more, say $50, to get a 1600x900.
Why won't 'HD' just hurry up and die? (Score:5, Funny)
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640x480 = 307200
1280x720 = 921600
1920x1080 = 2073600
Remember that 720p TV was triple the pixels of NTSC and non-interlaced so a doubling there as well, sure for a computer monitor it wasn't much but for TV it was a huge change with six times the bandwidth. In fact unless you're watching 1080p24 content with pulldown I'd rather take 720p over 1080i (interlacing: die die die). And maybe finally now UltraHD will drive a new generation of monitors, even on 30" it's topped out at 2560x1600/1440.
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Yes, and they had to make it all fit in MPEG2 over-the-air and the TV technology of the time was still CRT. They did a decent job given those constraints. If you designed the system today you might make different choices and you'd almost certainly use a different CODEC.
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I was referring to ATSC, but yes - even ATSC plans on using newer codecs in the not-too-distant future.
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I think that the argument was that the airwaves were public, and so those who benefit from the transition should pay some of the cost to those forced to transition?
Anyway, LCDs don't seem to have the life of those old CRTs, and OTA tuners seem less abundant in general, so it may not be as big an issue. There is an initial "backwards compatible" stage - hopefully they can make the next generation of sets more forwards compatible during that stage. I dunno, it's definitely a first-world problem! :)
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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.
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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.
Agreed. If it's not 1200 high (minimum), I'm not interested. Admittedly, this makes it difficult (but not impossible) to find monitors.
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who voted for this Slashvertisement? (Score:5, Insightful)
seriously, everyone who voted for this "article" needs a spanking.
Neat! (Score:1)
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You dont understand the need to look trendy. These are only being sold to up and coming executives that want to look like they are technology hip to senior execs... Sadly it makes them a laughingstock of the IT department.
Re:Neat! (Score:5, Informative)
I don't understand why I wouldn't just use a full-featured, full-power laptop...
I have a Surface Pro (NOT RT. Repeat after me NOT RT) tablet at work - and it works like a charm. It's a Core i5 running Metro + Win 8 pro. Runs full Office and has access to all network resources. At my desk it has its desktop extended to another monitor (try doing that with an iPad) with attached keyboard & mouse. Away from my desk it's got a detachable proper clicky keyboard and a nifty stylus.
If I'm "tableting" with it and I just want to check something I tap a metro tile's app and pull it up
If I need to do 'real' work I go to the Windows desktop.
All my colleagues carry two devices (iPad + Notebook) - I carry one. Every time I pull it out at a meeting or at the airport people say "oooh... what's *that*?" The RT noise is distracting people from what is otherwise a very cool machine.
You couldn't pay me to lug a laptop around anymore.
Keyboard... (Score:3)
Am I the only one who is sick of those right-shift-key-right-next-to-up-arrow keyboards?
MSFT is going to ruin tablets like netbooks (Score:2, Interesting)
MSFT with their "golden touch" is poised to ruin tablets just like they did with netbooks. When netbooks were introduced, they had a lightweight version of Linux and no harddrive. MSFT made them into impractical laptops which ran XP. Now that ASUS is selling a Windows "tablet," I guess we can look forward to the same "innovation" that killed the netbook.
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Ditto. If this wasn't a crappy 'Transformer' with a touch screen I'd buy one to replace our old netbook, but I don't want something that's a crappy tablet that also tries to be a crappy netbook.
Meh? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Meh? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't get it, how is this not an iPad killer?
It's not an ipad killer because Microsoft hasn't built up the mindshare that Apple has, and because Windows 8 is pants. Microsoft tried to sell the Surface at boutique prices, and that didn't work out as well as they'd hoped. This device is at least priced right, but that only fixes one problem to uncover several more. Not the least of which is, most people don't want Windows 8. Yes, it'll run Microsoft legacy apps, in a weird, Win8 kind of way. That's not as important as it used to be.
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> Windows 8 is "pants"... on the desktop. But on a tablet, that's where the interface doesn't suck.
Compared to Windows 8 on the desktop.
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Could it be... that Win8 is the problem?
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This new one also advertises 11 hours of battery life, compared to 5 for the Surface Pro.
The Surface Pro 2 should be a nice upgrade with the Haswell processor extending battery life. But they will never sell many at those prices.
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I think the fact that it has Windows (and not RT/iOS/Android) makes it different. If it ran OS-X, I'd be just as interested. There is software I (and, I believe, others) use that only runs on OS-X and Windows. That would be a reason for some to get this. I've wanted a tablet. There isn't an OS-X one and the other ones that run Windows (again, RT is not Windows) are much more expensive than this. Of course, if Apple ever comes out with an OS-X tablet, it's probably going to cost at least $1,500.
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It's meh because it's essentially the same as the previous generation - except for the price.
Quad core - only 1.3GHz and still Atom (albeit with OoO execution) so pretty meh.
Still only 2GB RAM, so meh.
Only 32/64 gigs of slow-ass on-SoC eMMC pseudo-SSD storage, with even the 64gig version only providing about 30 gigs of usable space after you subtract the Windows 8 recovery partition and the space Windows 8 itself uses, so meh.
No active digitizer as far as I can tell, so meh...
If Bay Trail truly provides a s
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Call me back when the a version not running an Atom CPU. For $400, you can easily get yourself a notebook with a *real* quad core and 4 GiB of RAM.
And two hours of battery life.
I was looking at potential netbook replacements recently, and there certainly were a number of non-Atom options in the $400-600 price range, but according to the reviews, if you actually tried to use the CPU power, it overheated due to the small form factor and throttled back, and still sucked the battery dry very quickly.
Meh-be (Score:2)
The roomie I just moved in with was appalled when I discovered for her that her newly purchased notebook was actually a slower and worse-off computer than the laptop she was hoping to "upgrade" from. So we sent it back and now she has the credit and wants me to shop for her.
She kept mentioning the RT and liking it, but I warned her away and told her that tablets are still a developing technology, that it's in its awkward stages and next year she'll have something worth picking up. She said "okay, maybe next
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Unlike earlier Atom-based Windows tablets, these Bay Trail ones seem like they will not be horribly slow. Personally I would opt for a model with a better screen, but would expect to pay more for it.
Re: Meh-be (Score:1)
It's priced like a pc only in the sense that it's less expensive than a tablet.
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Including the costs of a keyboard, a stand, a tiny piece of (potentially unreliable solid state) flash to make up for the "32GB" model really coming with 16GB of remaning capacity, the price point compares to a fairly decent, new, fully featured laptop.
That doesn't include the cost of realistically including a large, cheap flatscreen monitor to view without having to slouch.
I can't understand somebody like yourself who embraces new technological gimmicks without thought. The tablet isn't "the new PC", yet.
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Don't ruin your friends life by steering her away from something she likes and serves her purpose just because it doesn't serve YOUR purpose.
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I had mentally excluded microSD from the criteria of "removable media" because when I showed her what a microSD looks like, she said "forget it". So, sorry chum but sometimes size does matter. And I, for one, have to agree with her. I don't think anybody should be reliant on something so important being so small, let alone the profit-minded producers of tablets. There are numerous practical reasons why not to consider microSD for anything but cameras, ipods, and other tiny devices that you don't really inte
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Ok, so you're one of those people that lets their agenda get ahead of the truth. Nice to know.
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The roomie I just moved in with was appalled when I discovered for her that her newly purchased notebook was actually a slower and worse-off computer than the laptop she was hoping to "upgrade" from. So we sent it back and now she has the credit and wants me to shop for her.
She kept mentioning the RT and liking it, but I warned her away and told her that tablets are still a developing technology, that it's in its awkward stages and next year she'll have something worth picking up. She said "okay, maybe next year it would be a good idea" but still seemed lost.
I'd like to say she has some good news when she gets home today, but the tablet isn't much better than the notebook. There's no removable media, not even a full-size SD slot?
I see these things as glorified palmtops. They're just slightly larger, but they fit the same niche -- something to pull out of your backpack or Euro-wallet at the airport or cafe and use within serious constraints on time and space. It's a useful gadget to complement a fully functioning PC at home, but IMHO it doesn't really qualify as a principal or "base" PC.
But oh, look: it's priced like a PC.
Scratching my head / not catching on.
Very interesting - the way you put it. If you read Anand and Brian's analysis of Baytrail / Silivermont performance, it pretty much lands up at half the CPU and a third of the GPU performance of a typical Core i5 that you would find in a slim notebook (Ultrabook). The crucial difference is of course that Baytrail consumes dramatically less power - about 2-3 watts (compared to 10-15 watts for a regular notebook CPU/GPU).
Reference: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tes [anandtech.com]
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It would be super interesting if Intel came out with a version of Silvermont with beefier graphics (say, HD3000). I suspect that would be enough to support full HD meaningfully and to be a true viable notebook replacement.
As it turned out, the roomie's bad experience with purchasing her first ever brand-new computer online left a sour taste in her mouth about the whole idea of buying a computer online. It's hard to reason with superstition. And, since I'm not somebody she knows very well, I wasn't able to convince her to try any other online avenue. She was firmly set on the brick and mortar route, and was too impatient for me to call around to the almost a dozen local computer stores looking for a deal. So off we went to Be
Bye Windows RT (Score:2)
Hmmm, with mainstream Intel platforms approaching the power savings of SoCs, maybe Microsoft should drop the other shoe and kill off RT. If standard Windows will run acceptably on these devices, there's no reason to keep RT going!
This is what the Surface RT should have been (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
We've already seen how small the market for netbooks is.
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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...
While t
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Exactly. I posted before that Surface is 4X overpriced. I got a lot of flak. But here is a counterexample.
They do need to bump up resolution to 1080p and put in a Wacom stylus but with that exception this is what I was hoping for with Surface (features and price-wise).
A step in the right direction (Score:2)
Finally someone has figured out how to build and sell a Windows 8 tablet. I think that $349 is a very attractive price point. Especially when you consider that it comes with Office, a physical keyboard, and an SD card slot for storage expansion. Ok, so the screen isn't going to set the world on fire but it's very usable. I could see something like this as a good note taking device for school/meetings. Maybe some light internet browsing or Netflix viewing.
The big mistake Microsoft has made is trying to compe
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It's even more attractive if you can put Ubuntu on it.
However, I won't buy a tablet without LTE.
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Maybe someone will figure out how to boot from the SD card, like you can do on a Nook.
Thats great but... (Score:2)
windows sucks....
Upgrade? (Score:1)
But can it be upgraded to Windows 7?
Classic Shell is all the upgrade I needed (Score:2)
With the Bay Trail.. (Score:1)
It's definitely more worth getting on around that price (could be a little lower) but still a lot better than the old crappy atom architecture we have now that needed an update for a long time.
Storage space? (Score:4, Interesting)
How are Windows 8 AND Office supposed to fit comfortably (and be usable) on 64GB of storage, much less 32GB?
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well at least it has 2 gigs of ram..
on more relevant note: it does make surface rt pricing a joke(this and probably next gen..).
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a billion dollars is a genuine fuckup.
it's easy to see why they took the risk as well. they wanted to see how a platform goes where people are forced to pay MS to pay for their software, a platform where MS has all installation statistics, a platform where MS controls what can be installed. They shoved hundreds of millions down ISV's throats too trying to get software for it.
it probably would have fared a little better if they had allowed other than metro sw on it though.. but they ran out of time to provis
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The billion dollars was a 'we give up' payoff.
They most assuredly lost a lot of money before that too.
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it probably would have fared a little better if they had allowed other than metro sw on it though.. but they ran out of time to provision that, so they took the easy route.
They should have modified Visual Studio to produce fat binaries that include both ARM and Intel binaries.
I think this is what Apple did to XCode during their PPC/x86 transition.
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.
They missed a great opportunity by not letting RT/ARM run desktop applications. And it was a arbitrary decision too, not a technical one as RT has been hacked to
Re:Seems Pricey (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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They wanted an app store, partially, but not just, "because that's what Apple does". Essentially they know that they can't make money on OS software for tablets. The price points have been set too low by Android devices, and even Apple devices. So the only way to play in the tablet business is to try to make money on all the content, including apps.
Yeah, they could've tried, I guess to charge an OS premium for "it runs all your Windows apps", but that probably wouldn't have flown. Either way, the price
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"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.
Yes. .NET does that. But it never really got used for shipping stuff using the Byte Encoding, just the final x86/x86-64 binary encodings. Yeah, some people did the byte encoding stuff early on, but that quickly fell by the wayside as people realized it was only ever going to be on Windows, and normally 32-bit/64-bit x86 Windows at that.
Yeah, if they got serious they could push for the byte encoding again, or even make it the default output. But then, you wouldn't get much benefit if you had to mix non-.N
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I have particularly unpleasant memories of dealing with some application whose developers had managed to make it require
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well, it was political. what I meant with ran out of time is that they ran out of time to shoehorn windows ce apps into the application store and they ran out of ideas how to sell that to the audience that they could only get the apps from the application store..
the had planned that metro would work as the trojan horse to tie people to their software marketplace. too bad nobody seems to want metro apps.. and why the fuck would I indeed want pdf viewer that can show me one pdf at a time and in general an exp
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I would think that Apple would much rather get parts from Intel than from Samsung.
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I think Microsoft had two motivations to release the RT: (1) to show that they are a player in the ARM space. (2) to muddy the waters in the non-Intel tablet field. There might have been a third motivation, to strong-arm Intel into releasing a more tablet-friendly architecture, but I suspect that was a bonus rather than an objective.
In any case, I agree with you -- the RT is dead. It was never meant to be a serious product.
a step away from the wrong direction (Score:2)
This a real game-changer, it's almost not deludedly idiotic.
Any Atari 8-biters out there remember the dirty membrane keyboard peasants that could only afford the Atari 400 back in the day?
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You mean the dirty membrane keyboard peasants that could only afford the Sinclair ZX-81? Those Atari people were minor barons at the very least.
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Really now? Show me a netbook with an IPS screen and 4 cores that sells for less than $349. What? Can't find one? Whoops...!
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And has a x64 processor to run win apps too.
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Really? I use x86 DAW/Djing software and I've been looking for a tablet robust enough to run them on. If this will run my performance software reliably then I'm in for one, and it saves me several pounds on my travel rig. If you have a better way to run low-latency audio software then I'm curious to hear about it.
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How long will people think that x86 and/or x64 instruction set compatibility is a selling point?
So long as they have crusty old x86 Windows software they need to run.
Locked bootloaders (Score:2)
How long will people think that x86 and/or x64 instruction set compatibility is a selling point?
That depends on how long Hollywood and the game industry insist on a proprietary software business model, and how long ARM remains correlated with cryptographically locked bootloaders that the user either can't unlock or can't unlock without wiping the device.
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Really now? Show me a netbook with an IPS screen and 4 cores that sells for less than $349. What? Can't find one? Whoops...!
See Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, S4, etc.
tab 3 is first of all arm(people wouldn't call it a netbook.. ), keyboard costs extra and it's base price is 400 and it's also just dual core at that and with just 1 gig of ram...
galaxy S4 on the other hand is definitely not a netbook and it's off contract price is somewhere around 580.
if they can get this to shops for 350 it's a steal.
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Seems rather pricey for a 10" netbook.
True. But significantly cheaper than the Surface Pro. At least, the prices are going in the right direction.
Still, Win8 would have to improve considerably before I'd ever consider one.
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Where is the linux angle? Not even a conversion coupon code?
It isn't mentioned; but 'Windows RT's fairly clear demise, in favor of cheap-ass x86 devices, is almost certainly good news for Linux(Not 'This is the year of Linux on the Desktop!!!' news; but good).
Per Microsoft's secure boot requirements, ARM-based 'Windows RT' hardware Must Not allow (either out of the factory, or by user modification) signing keys for boot payloads other than Microsoft's own and cannot allow disabling 'secure boot', while x86 Win8 devices can.
It remains to be seen how many will a
Yes but this isn't Windows RT (Score:2, Informative)
As I understand it, this is a Win8.1 x86 device, so the obnoxiousnesses you and others mention about RT do not apply.
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There obviously isn't much stopping Microsoft from having another try at iOS-envy and mandatory app stores on x86 (the implementation on ARM, using UEFI secureboot and a restrictive SRP in the windows image, would be 100% doable on x86); but as previously implemented, that was a major distinction: Wintels would be more or less as they have always been, Win-ARM would be
Re:one big flaw though (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
I don't understand peoples' dismissal of Metro, considering it's not even the star of the OS. It's just a weird-looking box house that you can, for all intents and purposes, totally ignore and go on without really using. I only acknowledge its existence because I see it every time I go to start searching for somethi
Re:one big flaw though (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Mod up. This is a key point that Microsoft doesn't seem to get. If we're going to be typing the names of programs, why not just boot into a CLI? Why even bother with that garish refrigerator-door interface?
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> 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
Ok, agreed. Given that, why do you need touch?
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Took me all of 5 minutes to find an app to give me a start menu in windows 8, and I use it purely in desktop mode on my laptop.
So every time you use a Windows 8 PC at work, or while traveling, or at a friend's house, you're going to download new start menu software and install it on their PC to make it work something like it should have worked to begin with?
Yes, people let me install Classic Shell (Score:2)
So every time you use a Windows 8 PC at work, or while traveling
While traveling, I'm more likely to use my laptop.
or at a friend's house, you're going to download new start menu software and install it on their PC to make it work something like it should have worked to begin with?
Yes. Here's how it typically goes in my experience: "Are you sick of the Start Screen covering everything up when you want to start a program? I am too. That's why I installed Classic Shell on my aunt's PC and my PC at work. It makes Windows 8 look like Windows again. Want it? OK, put in the admin password and I'll install it for you. If you want to get back to Metro, you can always Shift-click the Start button."
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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.
As much as I dislike Apple (my work issued me an ipad; after a week I gave it back), they understand touch interface in a way that Microsoft probably never will. Yes, with diligence you can figure out how to make Win8 do most things, but it's not an OS you can just pick up and use, as you can any Apple device. Conveyance, I think someone said. They eye is not led to what the fingers should be doing. It's a major defect, and it may not be fixable.
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Asus netbooks were awesome; the build quality on our Eee PC netbook is better than my laptop that cost nearly 4x the price. But the Android Transformers feel very delicate in comparison -- I've seen a number of people on web forums complaining that they cracked the screen when removing the tablet from the keyboard dock -- and this just looks like a Transformer with an Atom CPU instead of ARM.
And, of course, it will probably be even more horribly out of balance than the ARM Transformer as I'm guessing there'
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"Nobody" is pretty strong. For example, I'm pretty sure that more PCs are running Windows8 that Linux, yet nobody in their right mind would say "Nobody wants Linux so who cares?", would they?