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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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.
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.
"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.
How are Windows 8 AND Office supposed to fit comfortably (and be usable) on 64GB of storage, much less 32GB?
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.