Asus Vivo Tab review
This Atom-powered hybrid impressed but may not suit anyone
After being thoroughly impressed by the excellent Asus Vivo Tab RT, we moved over to look at its bigger brother – simply called the Asus Vivo Tab. It’s another ZenBook-Transformer mashup, taking DNA from both of Asus’ premier product lines to create a laptop-tablet hybrid with a metal chassis.
This is an 11.6in device, so it’s noticeably bigger than the Android-based Transformers we’re used to. Despite this, the tablet alone weighs in at 675g and so is surprisingly portable and easy to use, given its size. The dock adds an additional 650g. Docking the two together is a little stiff, but you get a little force-feedback buzz to tell you it’s clicked into place, and once done they feel like a single device.
The hidden difference between the two is that the Vivo Tab runs the more-traditional, full-fat version of Windows 8 – rather than the limited app-store only Windows RT. This means you can install applications from anywhere and run applications designed for older versions of Windows. To do this it uses an x86-based Intel Atom processor. This is a dual-core chip running at 1.8Ghz, making the Vivo Tab a touch ahead of modern netbooks in terms of speed.
The 32nm chip should be very power-efficient, though its size means it still can’t compete with ARM-based designs. The Vivo Tab is estimated to have a 13 hour battery life, that breaks down to eight hours for the tablet and an additional five for the dock, which has its own built-in battery. For a sizeable netbook that’s pretty impressive.
Windows 8 was running smoothly on the device, at least the Start menu and pre-installed apps did, we can’t comment on what will happen if you try and run serious applications such as video editing or Photoshop, but based on benchmarking previous Atom-class devices we know it won’t be pretty. That might leave the Vivo Tab in a no-mans-land, neither powerful enough for serious work, yet more expensive and more power-hungry than Windows RT alternatives.
That’s hard to say until we see how people use Windows 8, but it’s still a great-looking piece of hardware. The screen is a Super IPS panel, and though the resolution is a modest 1,366×768, we’ve run out of superlatives to describe the quality of these displays. The keyboard is up to the standard of recent ZenBook release, with plenty of feedback for such a slim design.
Ports are rather slim on the ground by laptop standards, though not for an Ultrabook. With two USB ports and an SD card reader on the dock and a micro SD card reader and micro HDMI port on the tablet. A digitiser stylus is available for the Vivo Tab, so you can write on the display, with up to a 1,000 levels of pressure sensitivity. We saw a nice demo where two Tabs had a Microsoft One Note document synchronised between them, so we could both write and mark the same document in real time.
The Asus Vivo Tab should be available in time for Windows 8 launch, and will cost approximately EUR 699 for a model specified as above with 32GB of flash memory for storage. It’s a great piece of hardware, and it’ll be interesting to see whether Atom-powered hybrids take off.
