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

Battery life

Not even the BravoWind 10K’s battery life can redeem it, as it lasted just 4 hours and 5 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our standard brightness measurement of 170 cd/m2. Compare that to the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14, which lasted 11 hours and 20 minutes in the same test, and the BravoWin 10K falls well short of living up to its portable potential.

Display

Of course, for £150, you’re never going to get a particularly fantastic-looking display on the BravoWin 10K, but it actually produced much better results in our display tests than I was expecting. While its 1,280×800 resolution is quite grainy for a 10.1in display, its 72% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut certainly isn’t the worst score I’ve seen from a laptop, and its contrast ratio of 959:1 is very respectable indeed.

It’s not massively bright, but a peak white level of 224cd/m2 is more than enough when you’re using it indoors. You’d certainly have to set to maximum brightness if you end up using it outdoors, but this will probably be a fair rare occurrence given its poor battery life.

Ports and storage

It does, however, come with a fair selection of ports, all of which are housed around the side of the display. You get a full-sized USB3 port, a Micro USB port, a microSD card slot and a Mini HDMI port for connecting it to an external display. There’s also a headphone jack and support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

You’ll probably want to take advantage of its microSD slot, as the BravoWin 10K only has 32GB of eMMC storage available. However, it only supports cards up to 64GB in size, so if you need any more space than that, you’ll need to be prepared to store the rest of your files in the cloud. It’s a similar setup to other cut-price laptops we’ve seen recently, such as the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 as well as just about any entry-level Chromebook, but this may not be ideal if you like to store your files locally. As a result, you might want to consider spending a little bit more and buying something with a proper 500GB hard disk.

Conclusion

The Venturer BravoWin 10K certainly isn’t intended for touch computing tasks or gaming but rather for simple day-to-day computing. At just £150 you’d be hard pressed to find anything else this cheap admittedly, with the hybrid device packing in an impressive number of ports and features. However, we still don’t feel it’s money well spent.

It might be reasonably quick, but its awkward keyboard and terrible touchpad make it an exercise in frustration when it comes to actually doing any work on it. Combine that with terrible battery life, a grainy screen and the way it gets rather hot to handle, and the BravoWin 10K is just one big compromise. 

Instead, you’d be much better off buying the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14. This also costs £150 and has a far superior keyboard, higher build quality and also throws in a year’s subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Personal to the mix, making it excellent value for money. Alternatively, the Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA can be had for around £200 and is a far nicer-to-use hybrid if that’s what you really need. Alternatively, check out our regularly updated Best cheap laptop article for even more laptop bargains.