Asus Vivo Tab review
This Atom-powered hybrid impressed but may not suit anyone
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.
