Today on my Tech Talk GlobalTV Sunday Morning News I showed a stunningly designed Android Tablet and a price conscious Windows 8.1 10.1 inch hybrid Tablet/Notebook.
The Lenovo Yoga Tablet features an unorthodox design resulting in a very thin format for holding, tilting and standing the ultra-light and slick magnesium alloy tablet. It comes in 10-inch $299 for the 16GB and 8-inch $249 running Android 4.2. It also take microSD cards for adding up to 64 GB more storage space.
The Yoga Tablet features a finger-thick cylindrical edge which houses two batteries normally found in laptops, giving you 18 hours use on the 10-inch and a bit less on the 8-inch. It has so much reserve power that it can even charge other devices via USB. Nice!
Does the Yoga really run for 18 hours? It depends on what you are doing. I watched four two-hour 720p battery-draining movies and got more than five hours of reading on top of that. Impressive.
Back to that cylindrical edge. It feels like you are holding a magazine, rolled on edge. This keeps the weight in your hand leaving a thinner-than-most-smartphones tablet. A cleverly designed kick-stand in the cylinder swivels out keeping the tablet upright in horizontal mode with varying angles. And a nice set of rich sounding speakers to boot. Flip the Tablet around and now you have a comfortable tilt angle for typing on the touch keyboard.
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Genious!
Speaking of which, Lenovo “hired” the services of Ashton Kutcher as a Lenovo product engineer and a starring role in some amusing promotional vids…no doubt at a salary much higher than his official job title. Kutcher, a self-professed tech freak, will be involved in various aspects of designing and marketing the Yoga line of tablets.
The Yoga manages to get away, barely with the its lacklustre 1280 resolution, thanks to a brilliant display and true IPS wide angle viewing. It processor performance is below average but its pros outweigh enough to make it an affordable winner.
The 10-inch Yoga Tablet will be available October 30, 2013 at BestBuy.ca and Lenovo.com/ca. The 8-inch model will be available in mid to late November at all other Best Buy locations and Lenovo.com/ca.
The Asus Transformer Book T100 with an Intel Atom ‘Bay Trail’ quad-core processor works like a regular clamshell laptop but the removable full press keyboard converts it into a tablet with full Windows 8.1 gesture support.
Priced at $399 with 32 GB SSD drive and 2 GB RAM, the T100 offers a lot of value. A nice smooth design and durable finish, weighing 1.07kg with keyboard only 550g as a standalone tablet.
The T100 runs on the new Intel Atom Z3740 quad-core processor, plenty of multi-tasking power and more than 10 hours of battery life (the specs say 11 hours but in my use I got slightly less, still a long working very portable workhorse.)
Where does Asus Transformer Book T100 fit in the some 100 windows 8 and 8.1 devices out there? It basically sells for similar prices of the much lesser performing Windows RT models. It’s cheaper than and gives you a bigger bang for the buck compared to the Microsoft Surface 2 (RT), $449.99. Microsoft seems to be shying away from using “RT” and simply calls the new version “Surface 2” (it will not run legacy Windows programs but does come with a special “RT” version of Microsoft Office Suite.) In comparison, the new Windows Surface Pro 2, $999.99 runs older Windows programs, like the Asus Transformer Book T100, but costs almost three times as much after you purchase the better keyboard cover combo and it runs on a higher Intel processor and full HD screen resolution.
The Surface Pro 2 1920 screen resolution vs the T00’s 1366, stands out but not that much in 10-inch screens. After trying more than a dozen Full HD 10-inch convertible Windows 8 laptops, I actually find the higher resolution unnecessary, especially with tiny icons and fonts, which don’t seem right after adjustments. T100 quad atom can trump an i5 chip the Surface 2 runs on, in terms of efficiency, keeping up and lightness. For example, I was able to run Adobe Photoshop reasonably fast on the T100, something the Surface 2 cannot handle.
The Transformer Book T100 also features ASUS Instant On technology from standby mode which can last two weeks.
The sound is descent, for that size devices featuring ASUS SonicMaster audio technology. It also has USB 3.0, 802.11a/b/g/n dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.
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