Win8 Tablets

Well I am very pleased with my Latitude 10. Picked up for approx. £300 - Atom chip, 64GB storage, 3G, Win8 Pro and nearly 10hrs battery life (real world) from 2-cell. There is a 4-cell available too, but that is a little chunky.....find the tablet is great for pick up and quick tasks, I even use a stylus in some applications, as it has Wacom active digitiser support, and have found very useful in my line of work for taking to meetings and running full-fat Office apps.
Still, YMMV :p
 
kevpuk said:
Well I am very pleased with my Latitude 10. Picked up for approx. £300
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I must admit, after a day's research I've jumped on the Dell/Win8 bandwagon too. I hope MS's shareholders and cheerleaders are happy. :-)

I spent some of yesterday faffing around with an old laptop, and some more of today messing about with Android and an app which claims to work with Treepad files (the very simple text database I use daily). But although I'm not made of money, I can afford to gamble with £279inc for WinPro/64GB/Micro-SIM slot. Throw in a tenner for a Three321 PAYG card, which'll keep me in mobile data for yonks, and the grand total of £4 for a cheapo case with built in (nasty!) keyboard and I'll have a few more options than either the iPad of Nexus7 offer.

Both are great devices, but a device with SD slot and USB will make life so much more painless and flexible. And I've seen enough software running on the Latitude 10 now to be confident it'll do everything I need and more besides.

Free Dell (Outlet) delivery until the end of Sept made a difference. That claims to have saved me £30! I'd never have paid that much unless they were shipping it slipped into a lap dancer's thong.

At the side, obviously. I doubt these things are waterproof.
 
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And that's the point ^^

IMHO, there is a place for such Win8 tablets, in that they offer a whole load more flexibility in terms of standard Windows software than the Android/iOS counterparts.....couple that with things like full-size USB slot and a genuinely useful device is what one has.

Still, if I did not have the need to full-fat Office, flexibility of USB port and - to a lesser degree - the active stylus, I may well have grabbed a cheaper Android tablet. Had one of the original Transformers from day one, but my usage dwindled considerably as I couldn't do the more productive things, and my phone ably did everything else except on a smaller screen.
 
Bahhahhahhaaa why are companies so damn useless. At the AMD show, they show of an MSI Tablett, with a Temash chip. And it's running 1366x760 display.
God, MSI and AMD just go commit suicide you idiots.
 
kevpuk said:
Well I am very pleased with my Latitude 10.
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I, on the other hand, have had a bit of a Dell adventure. :-) My refurb with SIM slot eventually arrived after more than two weeks, and at first I was a bit underwhelmed by the screen size and resolution. After an iPad3 it's a bit hard to live with.

However despite desktop Win8 being nasty to use even on a tablet (IMO) I soon got over my niggles, remembered this was a bargain, and started to enjoy the freedom of finally being able to use a tablet exactly how I wanted to use it... rather than how Apple or Android want me to. Only this week I was struggling to get files off my Nexus7.

But when I went to try out the SIM card, I found my slot was missing. Unfortunately this coincided with me losing my phone line for nearly two weeks (cheers BT!) so after an intial email contact with Dell I put this issue on hold and the L10 back in its box.

This morning I got my phone line and net back and rang the nasty 0844 number. Spent half an hour to customer support, then tech support, then some nice oriental sounding guy, and now my case has been referred to their team in Hungary who will be in touch to tell me when the team in Ireland may or may not send me a replacement which I can actually put a SIM card in.

Apparently the card slot is there, it's just that the battery tray (which seems to be very stiff plastic or metal) bends up and covers it. So it looks like I may have found out why this is a refurb. :-) It shows up on the system as having a SIM slot, but folk keep sending it back because it doesn't have a SIM hole. :-)

I suggested to the tech support guy that I might be tempted to try and make a hole for myself, but he thought this wasn't a great idea. However after wasting money talking to various different people I'm half tempted to do it anyway!

Or I might just make the most of the nice weather and go out for a walk.

Anyway, the L10 has a predictably limited screen (which reminds me how much I love the iPad's form factor on a tablet), is pretty slow if you want to do anything computationally exciting on it, but is a real breath of fresh air when it comes to simple connectivity and usefulness.

I may well live with this (when it's sorted out) for a year and then think about upgrading to something running one of the more recent Atom chips, preferably with a better screen. Not that it's a poor quality screen... it's fine as long as you can live with the resolution and slightly stingy physical size.

Enough typing. :-)
 
Ok, Dell phoned me on Monday to say they were working on a refund or a swap. A few hours later I checked the Outlet website and there were still two L10's with SIM option available for the same kind of money I paid. But today they've finally decided they can't find one with a SIM slot, so will arrange collection and refund.

My L10 journey is over, and Dell haven't impressed me at all. Nice folk dealing with issues, but it was ultimately a frustrating experience all round. The quest for a decent, affordable Win tablet goes on!
 
Andrew_McP said:
Ok, Dell phoned me on Monday to say they were working on a refund or a swap. A few hours later I checked the Outlet website and there were still two L10's with SIM option available for the same kind of money I paid. But today they've finally decided they can't find one with a SIM slot, so will arrange collection and refund.

My L10 journey is over, and Dell haven't impressed me at all. Nice folk dealing with issues, but it was ultimately a frustrating experience all round. The quest for a decent, affordable Win tablet goes on!
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Well you have had fun!
Shame, really, as sounds like you were generally going to be OK with the L10. Mine has been fine, FWIW, and still gets reasonably regular use......ironically, mostly for taking PPT presentations to clients at the moment, but I have found it very useful as a device to run TOAD on too.
 
Brenn47 said:
6VynSeW.jpg
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Looks better than the official tablet with the rounded glass corners and subtle colours.
 
Yes, Venue devices do look interesting......I suspect I need to talk to my accountant to find a good business reason for 'upgrading' :p
 
Are the new Dell Venue tablets set to be released at some point today? All the reviews i've seen state a release date of the 7th November, but nothing is noted on the Dell website.

Mostly interested in the Venue 11, but the 8 could be interesting. Depends on full spec and cost, as its going to be an ipad replacement and/or laptop replacement, haven't fully decided yet.

If it's going to replace my laptop it'll need to be able to run AutoCAD, not sure how well a baytrail cpu will cope with this?
 
That looks like a superb bit of kit, found a video of some chap stress testing the multitasking, pretty damn impressive.


I'm gunna hold out till I see what the Surface 2 8" and what Nokia brings out in the 7 or 8" range. Either way these new tablets are looking pretty damn good value for money.
 
Brenn47 said:
That looks like a superb bit of kit, found a video of some chap stress testing the multitasking, pretty damn impressive.


I'm gunna hold out till I see what the Surface 2 8" and what Nokia brings out in the 7 or 8" range. Either way these new tablets are looking pretty damn good value for money.
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I figure for the money I can't really go wrong even if I decide to sell it in 6 months time. :)
 
Has anyone seen the Asus T100 with 64GB anywhere in the UK. A few places have the 32GB in stock at £349, but with windows taking up 16+GB of space it's not leaving much room for storage.

Can you install programs directly onto an external memory card, to keep the onboard storage as freed up as possible?
 
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