Never sure whether to post this in the Laptop/Tablet section, or Mobiles/Tablets…
Anyway, just thought I’d post thoughts on a recent purchase of mine (on the right), in case it helps anyone:
Following a ‘HotUKDeal’ (am I allowed to mention that?) post, I impulse bought a Linx 12x64 for £230 – with free memory card, woo hoo!
Initial impressions against a Surface Pro I was working on at the time… it’s more wide-screen
But the display certainly isn’t as vibrant as a Surface, and lacked a bit of sharpness/clarity – though bumping the brightness of the Linx helped a little. It’s no slouch, but at the same time, it’s not setting anything on fire performance-wise.
The kick stand is metal, not a sharp edge to it, but certainly not nicely rounded off; I would certainly expect it to leave marks on a surface, if you were to keep dragging it when in use.
The power button seemed a bit iffy, often failing to wake the tablet back up, and needing a longer press to do this – didn’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason.
The speakers are dismal, really really poor – like a goose farting in the fog (to coin Billy Connelly). They are tinny sounding above 60% volume, and even at those levels, you’d be hard pressed to hear them with any other noise in the room.
The magnetic dock seemed to lose its docking prowess pretty quickly – before you could pretty much sling them together and it would all line up perfectly fine, and snap into place with no troubles. But this seemed to be worse after a week, and you would find yourself having to guide it into place gently, or having to wiggle it around to snap together.
The screen surface picks up every single bit of oil from your fingers! I’ve never seen a screen this bad, goodness knows what coating it has on it, if any, but you’ll be wiping it down several times a day – if you’re bothered by it that is.
The touchpad is a right ******* too! There didn't appear to be a way to disable the gestures on it, and as it's quite small, you'd forever end up minimising windows, or zooming things in!!! The settings simply weren't present in Windows 10, likely down to the fact that the touchpad was showing as a mouse - I even tried to load Linx drivers for it, but no dice.
Oh yeah, and there's no hash key on the keyboard (used in paswords for me, not Tw*tter), nor is there an End/Home key
It came with Windows 10 Home, and the initial updating of this took aaaaaaages, well in excess of an hour – I got bored in the end, and carried on working on other things. Have a 200 meg line into the building, so I can only presume that it was the eMMC causing this slowness.
Following the updates I then set-about de-cluttering Windows 10, removing bloat and things I didn’t need, this freed up a nice chunk of the 64 gig storage.
Over the last couple of weeks of using it, coming from a Samsung Tab Pro 12.2; I’ve really enjoyed having the full Windows experience in a tablet, it’s been nice to not have to faff around with Solid Explorer for files etc. Loaded a couple of games to it, but the keyboard cover has an odd issue, whereby using WSAD to move often stops the touch pad from working.
Support for the tablet seems quite woeful though, and finding things such as drivers is harder than it should be. The Linx support forum (assume its official) also kicks you out if you run an ad blocker, and posts often go unanswered there.
Roll forward to last night however, and an odd fault has suddenly developed:
No idea why, but this happens during use, and would initially last a few seconds, but ended up pretty much doing it non-stop – a reboot would clear it temporarily, but it would just come back after a few minutes of use.
Ran through the usual list of fixes, but not joy – so I decided to just send it back for a refund, as this was a bit of an impulse buy really, and I’ve had a [tiny] bit of buyers remorse – insomuch as my main use of a tablet if for web browsing and youtube, both of which my Samsung does really well – so in a way, this fault is a bit of a blessing.
The Microsoft returns process has been pretty painless. Once I was able to get the right contact number – they don’t list the Linx as a supported device, only Surface.
So it’s back to the good ol’ Tab Pro for now – it’s still running well if I’m honest, has two tiny letters burned into the screen, but the battery lasts days and days (as expect for having two huge batteries!) – it’s also running a custom ROM and a bunch of tweaks I like.
I still have an itch to scratch though, but there doesn’t seem to be any interesting new devices on the market yet – and I don’t fancy paying silly prices; I’d wince at a £300 tablet!
Anyway, just thought I’d post thoughts on a recent purchase of mine (on the right), in case it helps anyone:
Following a ‘HotUKDeal’ (am I allowed to mention that?) post, I impulse bought a Linx 12x64 for £230 – with free memory card, woo hoo!
Initial impressions against a Surface Pro I was working on at the time… it’s more wide-screen
But the display certainly isn’t as vibrant as a Surface, and lacked a bit of sharpness/clarity – though bumping the brightness of the Linx helped a little. It’s no slouch, but at the same time, it’s not setting anything on fire performance-wise.The kick stand is metal, not a sharp edge to it, but certainly not nicely rounded off; I would certainly expect it to leave marks on a surface, if you were to keep dragging it when in use.
The power button seemed a bit iffy, often failing to wake the tablet back up, and needing a longer press to do this – didn’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason.
The speakers are dismal, really really poor – like a goose farting in the fog (to coin Billy Connelly). They are tinny sounding above 60% volume, and even at those levels, you’d be hard pressed to hear them with any other noise in the room.
The magnetic dock seemed to lose its docking prowess pretty quickly – before you could pretty much sling them together and it would all line up perfectly fine, and snap into place with no troubles. But this seemed to be worse after a week, and you would find yourself having to guide it into place gently, or having to wiggle it around to snap together.
The screen surface picks up every single bit of oil from your fingers! I’ve never seen a screen this bad, goodness knows what coating it has on it, if any, but you’ll be wiping it down several times a day – if you’re bothered by it that is.
The touchpad is a right ******* too! There didn't appear to be a way to disable the gestures on it, and as it's quite small, you'd forever end up minimising windows, or zooming things in!!! The settings simply weren't present in Windows 10, likely down to the fact that the touchpad was showing as a mouse - I even tried to load Linx drivers for it, but no dice.
Oh yeah, and there's no hash key on the keyboard (used in paswords for me, not Tw*tter), nor is there an End/Home key
It came with Windows 10 Home, and the initial updating of this took aaaaaaages, well in excess of an hour – I got bored in the end, and carried on working on other things. Have a 200 meg line into the building, so I can only presume that it was the eMMC causing this slowness.
Following the updates I then set-about de-cluttering Windows 10, removing bloat and things I didn’t need, this freed up a nice chunk of the 64 gig storage.
Over the last couple of weeks of using it, coming from a Samsung Tab Pro 12.2; I’ve really enjoyed having the full Windows experience in a tablet, it’s been nice to not have to faff around with Solid Explorer for files etc. Loaded a couple of games to it, but the keyboard cover has an odd issue, whereby using WSAD to move often stops the touch pad from working.
Support for the tablet seems quite woeful though, and finding things such as drivers is harder than it should be. The Linx support forum (assume its official) also kicks you out if you run an ad blocker, and posts often go unanswered there.
Roll forward to last night however, and an odd fault has suddenly developed:
No idea why, but this happens during use, and would initially last a few seconds, but ended up pretty much doing it non-stop – a reboot would clear it temporarily, but it would just come back after a few minutes of use.
Ran through the usual list of fixes, but not joy – so I decided to just send it back for a refund, as this was a bit of an impulse buy really, and I’ve had a [tiny] bit of buyers remorse – insomuch as my main use of a tablet if for web browsing and youtube, both of which my Samsung does really well – so in a way, this fault is a bit of a blessing.
The Microsoft returns process has been pretty painless. Once I was able to get the right contact number – they don’t list the Linx as a supported device, only Surface.
So it’s back to the good ol’ Tab Pro for now – it’s still running well if I’m honest, has two tiny letters burned into the screen, but the battery lasts days and days (as expect for having two huge batteries!) – it’s also running a custom ROM and a bunch of tweaks I like.
I still have an itch to scratch though, but there doesn’t seem to be any interesting new devices on the market yet – and I don’t fancy paying silly prices; I’d wince at a £300 tablet!