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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."
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?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Another windows 8 tablet. Quad core 1.8GHz, 1366x768 resolution. Meh.
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..).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What I wouldn't give to be able to travel back in time and prevent 1366x768 or '720p' from being defined as 'HD' resolution. Ideally with some sort of plan that involves more explosions than a braindead summer action movie. What a pox upon the eyes of the world, especially with so many applications making poor use of extra horizontal space (so it's barely better than 1024x768, circa 15 years ago) and 768 pixels being pretty narrow for the 'well, just flip it 90 degrees' strategy that saves other widescreens for non-movie purposes.
seriously, everyone who voted for this "article" needs a spanking.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Neat-o! Although, I don't understand why I wouldn't just use a full-featured, full-power laptop...
I don't respond to AC's.
Am I the only one who is sick of those right-shift-key-right-next-to-up-arrow keyboards?
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I don't know whether Surface RT was a genuine fuckup, or whether it was Microsoft reminding Intel that they've ported the NT kernel before and can do it again in the hopes of spurring them to get their shit together on the low-TDP side; but either way RT looks dead, dead, dead. Under interpretation one, Microsoft gimped it hard enough, either to protect other parts of their business or to push 'winRT'(the runtime not the OS) that it was pretty sick already and Intel just shoved a knife in it's back. Under interpretation two, Intel appears to have risen to the challenge, or at least close enough that full binary compatibility with all things Windows will be worth more (to anybody considering a Microsoft product at all) than an extra sliver of battery life.
holy crap , $349, with the keboard included ?!!! And it's a less crappy keyboard than the current crop of surface POSes.
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?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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 actually be purchased for linuxization; but Windows RT devices are (short of breaking TPM-backed UEFI secure boot) 100% useless for Linux, or anything else that isn't blessed by Redmond. Wintel tablets, though, are just funny shaped wintels, and so only the questionable state of Linux touch GUIs stands between you and installation.
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.
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.
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 provision that, so they took the easy route. however I think why they did it then was that ballmer wanted to try it before leaving.. I mean, Metro was seriously half baked in other aspects as well when shipped out, just like windows phone(still is, there's still couple of ridiculous limitations limiting types of apps one can make.. and hell, you might get vpn sometime next year ;DD and ms approved vpn at that so probably not nsa proof).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I don't think MS needed to tell Intel that. Apple's iPad sales alone would have done that. Apple is selling 15-20M iPads a quarter all of which don't use Atom. Then there are all those Android tablets. Apple has partnered with Intel many times before. There are rumors that the first iPad prototypes used Intel but battery life and heat were the two main factors that kept Apple from using Intel CPUs in iPads.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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...!
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.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The billion dollars was a 'we give up' payoff.
They most assuredly lost a lot of money before that too.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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!
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 something, like group policies.
And there's another thing: typing for what you want. A lot of people don't do that. There are tons of Windows users who still click through the control panel and then click through admin tools and then yada, yada. Well if you hit the windows key and start typing, what you want shows up pretty quickly.
Metro isn't any different. And I personally hated the Start Menu, it was slow to render and was a cluttered mess. Metro's a cluttered mess but at least it's immediately there when I ask for it.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
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. Seems like a lot of Win 8 complaints are complaining for the sake of complaining. I daily switch between win 7 at work and win 8 at home with no issue.
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.
It works for you, great. Other people don't like Win 8 for a variety of reasons besides the Start Menu. Don't be so dismissive od other people.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I would think that Apple would much rather get parts from Intel than from Samsung.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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 compete head to head with Apple on price. The iPad is seen as a premium product. And the Surface? Well, it's a Microsoft product. If they would drop the price, like Asus has done, they could see a ton of them. Windows 8 on a tablet is actually not a bad OS.
Good thing it's not a netbook!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Well, someone has a problem distinguishing tablets, transformers, phones, and netbooks.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
windows sucks....
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'll be even more heavy stuff behind the screen where you don't want it.
But can it be upgraded to Windows 7?
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?
As I understand it, this is a Win8.1 x86 device, so the obnoxiousnesses you and others mention about RT do not apply.
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.
That's why Apple is getting parts from TSMC and possibly Global Foundries in the future. It makes sense from a logistical standpoint to have more than one supplier. Using Intel doesn't help in that regard. Long term Apple believes they need to design their own chips. So far it has worked out. The new A7 seems to be another step in a larger scheme. Some competitors decided multiple cores was the way to go while Apple thought 64 bit was the strategy.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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 run in desktop mode.
And has a x64 processor to run win apps too.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> 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?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How are Windows 8 AND Office supposed to fit comfortably (and be usable) on 64GB of storage, much less 32GB?
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.
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 experience that goes in feel back to using dos with something like desqview(although, technically that was more fully featured multitasking system!).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
"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?
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 points for portable devices are on a downward trajectory, which is good for everybody but Microsoft. And if laptops get replaced by cheap devices like this one from Asus, then it's netbooks all over again, and the Windows monopoly will be worth a whole lot less.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
"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-.NET code with it.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Is it soldered to the board. This is the x501a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-HlMu7DCY the x502a you cant even do.
My chromebook cost $200 + just under $20 in tax. The extra 4GB of RAM was another $30 & the cheapest 7mm 2.5" SATA I could drop in was $50 at 320GB. So, I've made a laptop that maybe specs a little lower on the processing side in just $300 & I expect it to last me well into & past the 2.5 years one of these overly-integrated Microsoft Phabtops are expected to last. Google's point-of-entry is still lower & really seems to be picking up steam, especially when only half the top sellers on Amazon don't pay royalties to 'the man'.
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.
That depends on how big of an SD card you have plugged into your EverDrive plugged into your Nomad. As for the other Nomad, it started out with only 64 MB of flash memory.
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."
Even if it turns out that this tablet can't run Windows 7 well due to driver issues, you can still install a reasonable facsimile of Windows 7's UI inside Windows 8. Google classic shell and your Start menu will be back to how you remember it.
And yet the keyboard is one of the focal points in Unity, as well as GNOME 3 for launching applications as well. It works really well - typing quickly is faster than using a mouse.
A GUI doesn't mean ZERO use of a keyboard. I'm sure you use Ctrl + C/Ctrl + V to copy and paste instead of using the mouse all the time. Why? Because it's faster. But you'll also click on radio buttons for example because it's faster than tabbing to their group and selecting up/down for the right one.
That doesn't mean I like Windows 8 though (it's aesthetically crap and boring and takes us back to the early 90's of GUI design). But when I use Linux I also prefer having the ability to summon a means of typing in a few characters of a program I want to run instead of moving the mouse. Particularly if I'm already typing something and think of something else to run.
"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-.NET code with it."
.NET 4 and some 16-bit version of Installshield or something just to copy it into place, so I don't doubt that there is a lot of 'mostly ready' code that has resulted in products that aren't going anywhere but x86 without one hell of a shove.
I have particularly unpleasant memories of dealing with some application whose developers had managed to make it require
I just find it somewhat ironic that Microsoft theoretically has one of the better technological positions to support a multi-architecture binary software ecosystem, and has been working on it for years, and yet managed to fumble so profoundly and make so little use of that.
It should have had 4GB of RAM. 2GB really isn't enough to run Windows well. Aside from that it looks like a decent value.