My ongoing Tablet sarga

Soldato
Joined
30 Sep 2005
Posts
16,527
well you will find it funny, and so did the guys in the office this morning but for me....I'm ANGRY :mad:

let me set the scene....

I used to be the owner of an ipad, then upgraded to an ipad 3, then swapped to a Nexus 7 before finally selling it due to lack of use

OK, so I'm a geek and like wasting money on new toys

so...

about a month ago I got it into my head that I wanted a windows 8 tablet :eek: yeah I know, but stick with me.

I looked online and read a few reviews. The dell xps 10 at £249 for the 32gb model seemed a really great buy. Let's be honest, any 10" tablet from a well known company for under £300 seems to be a good deal right?

so I jumped in feet first and bought one. I loved it for two weeks, I really did. Windows 8 on a tablet works really well, I loved the apps as well. News, weather, music, skydrive, skype all worked great. I was well happy.

Build quality wise was ok...I wouldn't say great as mine had a little blob of screen bleed in the corner but no dead pixels, and the machine itself felt well built.

This is where things start to go downhill. You see being an IT geek I soon reached the limits of RT and craved for a full blown windows 8 tablet. RT is limited, there's no argument against that. You soon realise what a handicap not being able to do stuff like Install windows from an ISO, run your own VBscripts, run windows programs like Logmein etc etc etc. Yeah yeah, I know it's not really for that, but having something which looks like windows 8, but not really is like dangling a carrot in front of a skegness donkey.

so....I start looking online and come across the Asus ME400C. What's this I think to myself. Surely a 10" 64gb Full windows 8 tablet for £300 is just silly money? what's the catch? it's an atom, but to be fair, in benchtesting the atoms trades blows with the tegra3 and s400. so it's not a core i processor, but for a TABLET machine which can install ISOs, run my scripts, load any program I want seems the ideal machine for me.

The dell XPS 10 is soon sold on ebay at a £20 loss (I think I was lucky) and the Asus arrives the next day.

Man this thing is LIGHT. Super light. I'm impressed. Plus its faster than I thought. So where did this go wrong? Grrrrr, the screen was coming away from the glass. Classic Asus build quality again! The shop soon exchanged it for another one, but to cut a long story short the replacement had over 200 dead pixels on the screen. ok, that's why they are so cheap then.

Full refund given and I'm tabletless

Look on the great god google again and I come across the Dell Latituide 10. Since I liked the XPS 10 hardware wise and it was only full windows I wanted this looked a good contender. Slight issue with the price though at they aren't the cheapest tablets around. Luckily I spot one in the dell outlet, and using a discount code I managed to get a full 128gb model with mobile broadband and 4 cell battery for £350.

This is it this time, last tablet..honest

so..what was wrong with this one? nothing for the first day. Screen was excellent, no bleed, no dead pixels, it was fast, little bloatware on it, ran the windows 8.1 preview no issues. Finally! I've found one I like.

Next day, DEAD. Turns out the internal charging circuit was fried.

Back to dell for a refund.

I took a gamble and risked it with a second one. The next day I changed my mind and phone up dell to cancel the order. I had seen something really fantastic. THE DELL XPS 12. This thing looks awesome. It's an ultrabook and a tablet. Best of both worlds!! £1,200 though, OUCH! Spotted one again in the dell outlet for £500. It had an i5 processor, 8gb ram, full SSD, backlit keyboard, windows 8 pro. ok, this is it now. I ordered one :D

Took the day off work yesterday to wait in for the courier. Wish I hasn't though as he turned up after 5 :rolleyes: oh well, my luck again.

Opened the box, nice! carbon fibre finish, light for an laptop, fancy white leds around the side, backlit keyboard very fancy :cool: Then I flipped the screen into tablet model. BIG SCRATCH ON THE CASING :mad: Can I get it out? so I very carefully started rubbing it with some cleaner and I manage to reduce the scratch to something which is VERY hard to see...it's still there, but I can annoying live with it.

Booted it up for the first time and it asks me to create a recovery drive. First thing I need to download the software from the dell site :confused: eh? why? surely it should be part of the build? anyway, I got 80mb fibre it won't take long. Download the dell backup software and try to create my recovery drive. First time it creates me a 256mb image on the USB stick. If anyone knows about this stuff like I do, you will know that 256mb image is a plain windows PE boot drive. This will not restore the machine if it goes wrong. It simply boots the machine up so you can select the main recovery image from the hidden partition. That's not a recovery drive to me. If I swap out the SSD for a bigger one, what then?

Try a second time and it's asking for a 100gb usb disk? 100gb for a windows image....how much bloatware is on this thing.

so, me being me, I go into diskpart and start looking around. Turns out the recovery partition is missing. Windows recovery manager confirms this :mad:

give up on trying to do that and just start using the machine. DEAD PIXEL Grrrr!!!! come on! give me a break. ah hell, you know what, I can live with it....I think

so, I put a movie on and flip the screen into tablet mode. Picture doesn't rotate. I search on the dell forums and it's a common problem. You have to flip the entire machine, not just the screen. Seems the dell xps 12 promo video is a bit misleading, or there is a bug which dell can't fix. Can I live with doing that.....um, yeah I think so

so do I like the xps 12? NO

I wouldn't pay £500 let alone £1,200

I remember Steve Jobbs talking about notebooks before the ipad keynote. It's true, the xps 12 isn't the best of a laptop and the best of a tablet. It's the worst of a laptop, and the worst of a tablet.

In tablet mode it's too bulky, heavy....and the HEAT! and the FANS! :eek:

Email to dell and they apologise and offer me a refund and £50 discount code against another purchase

so....

Do I buy a Nexus 7 2013 or iPad 5 :D
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
30 Apr 2012
Posts
437
Location
Grimsby, UK
That's a hideous run of bad luck there, but to be fair whatever you buy next will have a much greater chance of being free of defects if you avoid DELL OUTLET! It's the debil :)
 
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