New Windows-powered tablet-notebook hybrids now in SA

Freaksta said:
Screen isn't great. I have quite a lot of glare? Anyone else having issues?
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The screen is terrible! Maybe I'm just used to the absolute perfection of the Nexus 7 2013 or the Apple tablets, but IMO it's barely usable!

I'm not impressed - it feels like it weights a ton and half, WiFi is sketchy (50%, where the Nexus shows 94%), screen is hard to read and has piss-poor angle of view, and no 3G. It's only redeeming feature is Windows, and even that has a terrible user experience compared to Android - particularly the on screen keyboard. I thought Windows 8 sucked on the desktop because it was suited to tablets; turns out it sucks everywhere.

I wonder if it's even worth keeping this thing. That screen is going to give me a headache every time I use it. I think I'm going to take advantage of Makro's 14 day satisfaction guarantee. (And this is after just an hour use.)
 
Drunkard #1 said:
The screen is terrible! Maybe I'm just used to the absolute perfection of the Nexus 7 2013 or the Apple tablets, but IMO it's barely usable!

I'm not impressed - it feels like it weights a ton and half, WiFi is sketchy (50%, where the Nexus shows 94%), screen is hard to read and has piss-poor angle of view, and no 3G. It's only redeeming feature is Windows, and even that has a terrible user experience compared to Android - particularly the on screen keyboard. I thought Windows 8 sucked on the desktop because it was suited to tablets; turns out it sucks everywhere.
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Judge it by its price maybe. Having said that I have a year old R2400 Chinese tab with 2 generations back Atom processor that still impresses me even after fiddling around with Apple/Samsung/Sony tablets.
 
mrudling said:
I got one of these today. Pretty awesome little devices. I was in the market for a media player but nothing was ticking all the boxes. For the same price, this little sucker competes with the best.
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This device doesn't have wired Ethernet, so how do you transfer movies? From local USB hard drive? Then you must move external HDD to PC to update library (or over slow WiFi).
 
Given that it is powered by Windows 8.1 one should be able to use a USB LAN port
 
Vis1/0N said:
Judge it by its price maybe. Having said that I have a year old R2400 Chinese tab with 2 generations back Atom processor that still impresses me even after fiddling around with Apple/Samsung/Sony tablets.
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Since I'm not poor, I can't pretend to review this device on their behalf. From my point of view, the cost of a ****ty screen, ****ty user experience and no 3G outweighs the price difference.
 
Drunkard #1 said:
Since I'm not poor, I can't pretend to review this device on their behalf. From my point of view, the cost of a ****ty screen, ****ty user experience and no 3G outweighs the price difference.
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You don't have to be poor to recognise value... If it isn't worth it to you return it.

Also why didn't you play with the display model if you were not sure of windows 8?

I personally like having the ability to my work(lots of python scripting) on the bus. No android tablet or iFad will ever have that ability.
 
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konfab said:
You don't have to be poor to recognise value... If it isn't worth it to you return it.

Also why didn't you play with the display model if you were not sure of windows 8?

I personally like having the ability to my work(lots of python scripting) on the bus. No android tablet or iFad will ever have that ability.
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I fail to see how you're going to code python on that keyboard! You don't have to be rich to see that buying a cheap-ass tablet will cost you ten times what you save. For coding, get an ultrabook with a good, physical keyboard - you'll put out ten times as much work, and pay off the extra cost in a matter of weeks. For everyone else, unless your time is worthless (ie, you've got hours a day to spend clutching your head in pain) get a decent tablet with a decent screen.

I will be returning it since even if I did play with the display model, I doubt I'd have noticed just how terrible (and un-fixable) that keyboard was (no point on the numeric keyboard* (makes keying in IP addresses hella fun); numeric keypad upside down; doesn't show password; doesn't appear automatically when it's needed (this isn't rocket science - I just clicked a text box, ergo, I need a god-damn keyboard. Android's got this right); and when you open it manually, it sometimes obscures the text box!) Don't even get me started on that screen!

Edit: *This pisses me off an unhealthy amount - it's probably got to do with locale settings, since everyone seems to think that South Africa uses a comma as a decimal separator. I mean, if you're going to get the default wrong, at least propagate the change to the on screen keyboard once I've corrected the locale settings. Open Office refuses to allow you to set your own decimal separator, and this one of my biggest reasons for avoiding it.
 
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Drunkard #1 said:
I fail to see how you're going to code python on that keyboard! You don't have to be rich to see that buying a cheap-ass tablet will cost you ten times what you save. For coding, get an ultrabook with a good, physical keyboard - you'll put out ten times as much work, and pay off the extra cost in a matter of weeks. For everyone else, unless your time is worthless (ie, you've got hours a day to spend clutching your head in pain) get a decent tablet with a decent screen.

I will be returning it since even if I did play with the display model, I doubt I'd have noticed just how terrible (and un-fixable) that keyboard was (no point on the numeric keyboard (makes keying in IP addresses hella fun); numeric keypad upside down; doesn't show password; doesn't appear automatically when it's needed (this isn't rocket science - I just clicked a text box, ergo, I need a god-damn keyboard. Android's got this right); and when you open it manually, it sometimes obscures the text box!) Don't even get me started on that screen!
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Hmm, it seems you were spending a lot of time in the desktop mode. As it's name implies it is not entirely suited for touchscreens. If you use the modern UI (metro) mode, the keyboard pops up properly and does't hide content.

As for coding, I just need something to make the 2 hours I spend in the bus more productive than they already are. Since I am a student with a fixed bursary, I am not going to suddenly get 10 times the money I get by working on the bus, hence I need something cheap and useful.

Besides which, worst case with the keyboard is I go out and spend R400 on a MS wedge keyboard.
 
konfab said:
As for coding, I just need something to make the 2 hours I spend in the bus more productive than they already are.
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I think you made it clear about correcting bug, not about full scale programming. Thanks for nice review, BTW.
 
Anyone tried Steam In-home streaming on one of these? Should work well
 
I just got the Nextbook 8" earlier today. The screen looks very grainy and if you tilt it just a small bit the image get's all messed up, looks like the screen is going black the more you tilt it, like the old touch screens of years ago. Is it suppose to look like that?
 
saa044 said:
I just got the Nextbook 8" earlier today. The screen looks very grainy and if you tilt it just a small bit the image get's all messed up, looks like the screen is going black the more you tilt it, like the old touch screens of years ago. Is it suppose to look like that?
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It does do that, yeah.

In other news, I've ordered a Microsoft Wedge keyboard for mine.
 
Bar0n said:
It does do that, yeah.

In other news, I've ordered a Microsoft Wedge keyboard for mine.
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Ahh cool, well this got me thinking. I am going to be without ADSL. I have the mtn Uncapped thing though and need a very low power server. I wonder if HD cabling have a type of USB adapter that would allow file transfer and charging at the same time. or will a powered hub do the trick there?
 
saa044 said:
I wonder if HD cabling have a type of USB adapter that would allow file transfer and charging at the same time. or will a powered hub do the trick there?
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No, it won't. I have self-powered hub which apparently supplies power back to the host (PC, tablet), but I don't know what is going to happen on the tablet side. Generally you should look for Y-OTG cable, or make it yourself - still there is no confirmation how it will work on this particular device.
http://sites.google.com/site/sonicboomworld/my-projects/otg-diagrams
 
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Not. The second link is an OTG Y-cable for supplying power to the external device - it says nothing about charging portable host.
 
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