Bay Trail slates just keep on multiplying. The latest one hails from Lenovo, and it’s called the Miix 2. As Liliputing reports, you can pre-order it at Amazon for only $299.99.
Those three hundred bones get you an 8", 1280×800 IPS display, a 1.8GHz Bay Trail Atom chip, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of solid-state storage, and Windows 8.1. The device weighs in at 0.77 lbs and measures 0.3" in thickness. Amazon says the battery life is 10 hours, but Lenovo’s website quotes a shorter, seven-hour run time. I’d be more inclined to trust Lenovo on this one.
What else? Well, there’s a two-megapixel camera at the front and a five-megapixel one at the back, and Lenovo had the good sense to include a microSD slot. Folks with a little more cash to spare can spring for a 64GB version of the Miix 2, which Amazon sells for $349.99.
As Liliputing points out, this isn’t the first 8" Bay Trail tablet out there. Dell’s Venue 8 Pro is in stock now for $299.99. The site also mentions the Toshiba Encore, which is listed for $329.99, but that one doesn’t seem to be in stock yet.
It’s nice to see full-fledged Windows tablets hit lower price points. That said, I’m a little disappointed that none of these offerings have high-PPI displays. 1280×800 may not look so bad with ClearType, but it feels kinda stingy compared to the $229 Nexus 7‘s 1920×1200 screen. Oh well. I guess the Nexus 7 doesn’t run Office and all your Windows apps.
Such a handy little tablet. Sure would be nice if it had Mediacenter on it. Oh wait, it doesn’t come with Win 8 PRO, which is required to add the Mediacenter app. You remember Mediacenter – that software that looks and acts just like Metro that came bundled with all flavors of Windows 7?
When are we going to see some Bay Trail NAS systems? Or some mini-itx boxes with just enough SATA ports that we can build NAS’ out of them.
I feel like one of these slates would be a good fit for me (don’t really like my 2012 Nexus 7), but I’m worried about the screen resolution on these. Should I just go play around at a Microcenter/Best Buy before deciding on jumping on one?
Probably a good idea, but cleartype really does improve the text readability. it’s a noticeable improvement over an android tablet at the same res.
YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE REALLY IMPROVES TEXT READABILITY? ;-D
Glasses!
My Asus Transformer Book T100 64GB should arrive Tuesday. Gonna try to replace my Thinkpad with this, since in theory in can do everything I need (with an $8 USB NIC from Newegg – kind of important in my line of work).
Will be sacrificing some functionality for portability, but let’s be honest if I have to do something complicated I’m doing it on a desktop with multiple 24″ monitors anyway.
A network engineer rocking a tablet for daily use… the horror. In two weeks we’ll see if I come crying back to the Thinkpad.
Best of luck, mate. Should be interesting to hear your thoughts on the excercise! =)
MIne arrived on Thursday. I find myself still using the old CULV which it was supposed to replace. In the T100, video playback is orders of magnitude better, and it even seems to render web pages a bit faster.
But, the touchpad is really bad. The fact that it goes to sleep so quickly is extremely aggravating, to the point of me thinking of plugging in a mouse. The keyboard is small – I can’t seem to get used to it. I’ve always thought that 11.6″ form factor is a perfect blend of small size and usable keyboard… this just confirms it.
Also, I bought a high-end superfast MicroSDXC for it (64GB Samsung Pro), just to realize that at least the write speed to the card is completely limited by the tablet itself (writing at 4-5MB/s, while the reviews on Amazon say they get write speeds over 15MB/s).
I can’t say that my first experience with Win8 is any better. It took me a while to get it to recognize my networked Win7 PCs and I haven’t managed to get a shared printer working. I guess I should spend time reading various How-To guides on the web, but this was never that difficult when everything was Win7…
And there’s other stupid stuff too.. the Video Player looks pretty and smooth, but trying to navigate to the networked PCs to access their MP4 libraries was a bit painful. When I finally managed to open the MP4 library (see networking issues above), it just showed me a bunch of tiles, one for each MP4 file, with a single frame from the movie – [i<]no file names[/i<]. How am I supposed to know which Lionsgate movie to pick when all I see is the Lionsgate logos?! The only way to see the file name as far as I can tell is to plug in the keyboard, and hover the 'mouse' icon over the image... In the tablet mode, it seems that all I can do is to start the playback to figure out what file it was. It was kind enough to let me sort them based on file name, but the names were still missing, and my memory isn't good enough to remember all the file names in that directory to be able to guess which file is which. I guess that last part is just because of Windows8, so I shouldn't knock T100 for that, but overall the experience has been disappointing. I'm thinking of returning it and waiting for those Haswell ultrabooks, like I knew I should have done in the first place.. I managed to install Civ4 on it, which is pretty cool. But I haven't tried playing it yet... somehow I doubt that the touchscreen support is that great.
The networking issues are strange. did you try to connect to the printer through file explorer? It’s essentially the same as 7, so i’m not sure. i’ve setup about 20 win 8 pc’s and haven’t had a different experience vs 7.
Right click the bottom left corner of anywhere, and you have the best menu ever.
change the default video player, and move on. VLC will be out soon for metro, and it should be solid.
civ iv will have crap touch screen, but 5 has a dedicated touch mode. i asked scott about benchmarking it, i assume long turns, but if the gpu is up for it, i’d play on it. He never did reply though 🙁
don’t return it, mail it to me. My Ativ 500t is starting to have issues (typical for a samsung product), and clover trail isn’t nearly as fast. 😉
[quote<]The networking issues are strange. did you try to connect to the printer through file explorer? It's essentially the same as 7, so i'm not sure. i've setup about 20 win 8 pc's and haven't had a different experience vs 7.[/quote<] I don't know what the issue was; it may have something to do with my user name. I have the same user name on the tablet and one of my PCs, but a different one in the other PC. The tablet wouldn't be able to connect to the other PC with a different user name... I'll look into this more when I have time. [quote<]Right click the bottom left corner of anywhere, and you have the best menu ever. [/quote<] How do I right-click in the tablet mode..? [quote<]change the default video player, and move on. VLC will be out soon for metro, and it should be solid. [/quote<] I saw a review somewhere (Anand?) that said the default video player is more power efficient than others, which is why I was trying to make it work.. I guess I gotta go with VLC then..
Strange about the user name issues. Are you using MS accounts, or local?
long hold to right click.
VLC isn’t public, they have private betas out though.
idk about the power efficiency.
Local accounts. I didn’t want MS to own me any more than they already do. Thx about the longhold->rightclick!
Thanks for your experiences. I’m considering the T100 but I think I’ll just stick to with my HP dm1z for the time being and wait to see if there’s a convertible with Bay Trail that nails it.
I’ll be toting a bluetooth mouse so not worried about the touchpad.
The keyboard is one of my primary concerns (along with the size of the screen…resolution is the same as my Thinkpad so no worries there). Having only 1 USB is a downer, especially given the lack of integrated NIC, but I will carry a hub for those time I need to console into something while plugged into the LAN. Don’t use RS232 near as much as I used to anyway.
Surely you can add network printers just like you do in other versions of Windows? Add local printer -> create standard TCP/IP port with address of the printer etc. In fact I am hoping the automatic driver detection will be an improvement over Win7. On Win7 sometimes I still have to download printer drivers and point to them manually, even for uber popular HP and Savin printers…not nearly as bad as WinXP mind you but this should not be necessary ever.
Since all my clients are on Windows domains with the server running DHCP and DNS, I should not have any p2p discovery problems like you describe.
You should right a forum post about your experience.
YEAH RIGHT A POST. RIGHT IT FOR US. OMG DID YOU MISS ME? DIDJA?
Are you….retarded?
That’s the dumbest question ever. if you need me to tell you, you should be asking yourself.
In a couple weeks I will do just that 🙂
Posting from the Asus. First impressions are really great – already rocking out on the keyboard. The touchpad is not so great but I’m not a fan of touchpads in general.
General performance is about on par with my desktop (i5-3550, Intel 330 180GB SSD, 8GB DDR3-1600MHz). Yeah I’m digging this…
That’s a really nice size, but is there a keyboard dock?….kinda needed for me. If they offer one with a real battery in it unlike the T100 this would look pretty nice.
$30 keyboard/case thingey?
Bump the Nexus 7 to 32GB and it’s still cheaper. Full desktop compatibility seems pretty cool, though, and Bay Trail is supposed to be great. 7-8″ tablets are the sweet spot from my experience.
How long until 200USD?
ETA: Not this device, but new one. This looks adequate for its price point.
Why hope for $200? Just wait until HP announces a Bay Trail tablet, wait a month, and BAM $100!
😀
Anyway I wasn’t talking about this device hitting 200USD, but new one designed for that price point.
(I’ll have to make an edit as I didn’t realize it could be misread)
ETA: BTW: I am currently waiting for local currency to settle down after stupidity of central bank so I can order Surface Pro 2, so I know I am in different market… Just wondered how quickly Windows tablets can close down price difference with Android tablets.
This needs to be imported into this country ASAP, they could make a killing on students…
What would you cut to get to $200 is the question, really.
WINDOWS, DUH. PUT ANDROID ON THERE AND ACTUALLY LOVE IT.
😀 But frankly, Android and iOS are useless toys and should be hidden somewhere. Not on this fine machine…
Would need cost breakdown, but there might be few ways to get lower without misbalancing or sacrificing too much.
No keyboard dock?
[quote<]I guess the Nexus 7 doesn't run Office [/quote<] QuickOffice - recently googlified - is decent enough to most basic task.
[quote<]...doesn't run Office.[/quote<] That's starting to sound like a positive to me.
as long as the most basic task you want doesn’t require proper formatting, or anything beyond the MOST basic typing, sure. the spreadsheet software is awful though.
edit: if you’re going to downvote, at least say why. it’s not news that quickoffice formatting doesn’t work properly in word, and anyone that actually USES excel for work will quickly find quickoffice doesn’t do much. if you’re just doing a few journal entries, sure, but beyond that, it falls down.
at least, that was the case a few months ago, maybe they updated and improved it? IDK.
Google defensively acquired QuickOffice just to keep android platform marketing competitive. They were obviously concerned as Google finalized the negotiations soon after Microsoft announced iOS Office, and moreso now that Apple bundles in iWorks. The problem is that functions are lacking and the UI isn’t well-considered, for example it takes too much effort imo to select cells for editing/formatting. I actually bought the iOS version early on but later abandoned it out of frustration, and my experiences with later versions since have not been impressive. QuickOffice is just not up to seriously replacing Office, and neither are other susbstitutes such as Docs to Go.
That’s been my experience as well, which is why i was surprised at the minusing.