Venturer BravoWin 10K review – a Windows 10 hybrid for £150

You probably haven’t heard of Venturer before, but this Hong Kong-based company has a long history of producing compact 2-in-1 Windows hybrids, with the BravoWin 10K being one of its latest. Of course, the main attraction is its price of just £149, making it one of the cheapest Windows 10 laptops we’ve tested. However, you certainly get what you pay for with the BravoWin 10K, as its basic plastic chassis feels incredibly cheap and poorly made, showing plenty of flex in the lid and keyboard.

Its hinge and screen also emit a worryingly loud creak whenever you open up the laptop, and I feel like I could easily snap the hinge backwards without applying too much effort. Admittedly, Venturer claims it’s done extensive drop-testing on the BravoWin 10K, but I can’t help shake the feeling it wouldn’t survive long if it fell off your desk or was repeatedly chucked into a bag with careless abandon.

Keyboard and touchpad

Naturally, due to its small, compact size, Venturer’s had to make some compromises on the keyboard and touchpad. The keys, for instance, are very small, which might be fine for those with small hands, but I found them to be very cramped, and I frequently missed a lot of keys as a result.

The strip of felt underneath the hinge also didn’t provide a massive amount of grip, either, as even a slight push on the palm rest would send it juddering backwards. As a result, it frequently slid around my desk when I was using it, and it was a constant struggle to keep it in place.

The touchpad is also shockingly slow and unresponsive, as the cursor repeatedly lagged behind my finger movements. Of course, there’s always the option to do away with the keyboard and simply use the BravoWin as a tablet instead. In fact, I found it much more pleasant to use as a tablet, and touchscreen inputs felt a lot quicker and snappier than the touchpad.

Performance

However, a responsive touchscreen isn’t much consolation when the device as a whole is rather lacking in speed, as the BravoWin 10K only comes equipped with a quad-core 1.3GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor and 2GB of RAM. It wasn’t able to complete our normal 4K benchmarks, for instance, so I had to re-run them using a 1080p video instead.

Admittedly, it actually scored much higher in our 1080p benchmark tests than other £150 2-in-1 devices we’ve tested recently, such as the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14. However, its overall score of 41 means it’s still not really cut out for high-level multitasking.

It can handle basic word processing and general office applications, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to have multiple web browser windows open at the same time, you’ll often have to wait while it tries to load them. The back of the screen also became very hot during even the most basic of tasks, which isn’t exactly ideal when trying to use it as a tablet.

Likewise, its integrated Intel HD Graphics chip isn’t built for anything but the very lightest of games. It failed our usual Dirt Showdown test, for example, and it barely broke 15fps when I turned everything down to its very lowest settings. I still just about managed a bit of Minecraft on its lowest settings, but it simply won’t cope with anything more demanding.