News - The KingSing W8 Windows tablet: first to break the $100 barrier

[HEXUS]

More evidence of the push for cheaper Windows devices from Microsoft and Intel.

Read more.

[shaithis]

1GB RAM? Even the newer Android builds have performance issues with that amount of RAM.

[CK_1985]

Get rid of the 3G and spend all the saving on more RAM please!! Other than that, sounds like an excellent spec for the price.

Fingers crossed some of these new ultra-cheap Win8 tablets make it to the UK in the not-to-distant future...

[DanceswithUnix]

I might be interested, depends how hard it is to reload it with Fedora Linux (Without Bing)

It would also need to be able to fit into one of those cases with the built in keyboard.

[Brian224]

This is half the price of a Nokia 1320. If Windows 8 tablets enter the market at the price of the cheaper WP8 handsets, that doesn't leave a space for RT.

[crossy]

This is half the price of a Nokia 1320. If Windows 8 tablets enter the market at the price of the cheaper WP8 handsets, that doesn't leave a space for RT.

If you're talking about RT then are you sure you don't mean a Nokia 2520 since that runs RT, whereas the 1320 runs Windows Phone 8.

Like you though I'm kind of wondering where this leaves RT - which always seemed a bit of a dumb/niche product, (like ChromeOS in that respect). Especially if Chipzilla's finest is now getting closer and closer to the extended runtimes of ARM-based gear.

Don't think I'd be in the market for one of these devices, sure the price is attractive (if it equates to £100 plus VAT), but I suspect I'd prefer to pay a bit more for a "named" brand with a bit heftier spec.

[DanceswithUnix]

Like you though I'm kind of wondering where this leaves RT - which always seemed a bit of a dumb/niche product, (like ChromeOS in that respect). Especially if Chipzilla's finest is now getting closer and closer to the extended runtimes of ARM-based gear.

I don't think I was ever in any doubt. Windows through the years has run on MIPS, Power, Alpha & Itanium. In WinCE guise it ran on SuperH as well. All "Me Too!" products, all gone.

I expect ARM will have to keep going for a while because at some point the contra-revenue for Atom has to stop and then the price shoots back up and if ARM isn't a viable platform at that point then Microsoft can wave goodbye to their phone market share (again).

[Top_gun]

Agree with comments 'more ram' and get rid of 3g. Also get rid of cameras.

With the right modifications this could make a fine kitchen tablet to replace the tv & radio/hifi. Especially with its IPS screen.

[Percy1983]

Looks perfect for me, I would buy one at £100.

[Top_gun]

Looks perfect for me, I would buy one at £100.

Not me. $100 is about £58.

[jimbouk]

Not me. $100 is about £58.

Plus tax makes it up to £70, still tempting at £100 though.

I've been very tempted by a full Windows tablet for a while after being so frustrated by the limitations of an iPad for just browsing the internet and missing my old portable laptop. A decent keyboard dock would be essential for me though.

[TheAnimus]

1GB RAM? Even the newer Android builds have performance issues with that amount of RAM.

Which is one of the things that amazes me about Android! How the heck can you struggle with that much RAM.

I frequently use a VM with less than 1GB of RAM and I have no troubles with it and windows 8.1. Granted, if you were to use Chrome for a complex web page, then it's going to struggle to swap, because the pagefile has to exist on something that's got no storage space!

[crossy]

Which is one of the things that amazes me about Android! How the heck can you struggle with that much RAM.

Two words ... Touch and Wiz
I've got two Android tablets here - Asus TF101 (Tegra2 dual-core and 1GB RAM) and 2012-edition Note 10.1 (Exynos quad core and 2GB RAM) and apart from boot times the TF101 is definitely the more fluid experience - especially for web browsing where I strongly suspect that one of this year's Samsung upgrades has pretty badly broken the Note to the extent where it can take 30-45 seconds to finish rendering a web page. Any iFan looking at it is going to (rightly) poke fun, and it didn't used to be this way.

Compare with my lill' Dell 620 - 3.5GB RAM and it runs Ubuntu (with GUI etc), VirtualBox, an XP and two Centos VM's quite happily at the same time.

Samsung bashing aside (it's too easy), I agree with what you're getting at. We've heard a LOT of fluff from Google on how they're "optimising" for small memory footprints, and I've yet to see anything but apparent memory requirements going up. I'm not going to say that Google are lying, but really guys - I judge by results.

And that's also one of the problems I have with the KS Windows tablet - if the OS is in a compressed file then surely you're going to have to wait for the uncompress operation which sounds like a great way for stutter when you're trying to use it - unless they've got some kind of clever predictive decompression going on. And then you've presumably got to page out something to fit the newly-decompressed code into.

For lord's sake tablet manufacturers - memory is cheap these days, so stop skimping!

[LSG501]

I'd take a punt at £75-100...but like others I'd rather have more ram and storage than 3g etc

It's not like £100 isn't doable from a 'no brand' company, and free 'windows with bing', Asus have been selling the fonepads for around £100-£125 with android on it with similar specs to this.

[gagaga]

1GB should be fine for casual use - it's browsers with 45 tabs open that eat RAM.

WimBoot (the method of storing Win 8 compressed) has not noticable effect on performance - a quad core atom CPU can easily do this is realtime, and it may actually improve performance on a mmc based device (as this will be). Lots of testing out there on the Dell Venue devices to back this up.

I got a Lenovo Miix for £125 in the recent Amazon offer (still available now for £150) and perfectly happy with what it can (and can't) do.

[TheAnimus]

For lord's sake tablet manufacturers - memory is cheap these days, so stop skimping!

Isn't that part of the idea? The whole squashing costs down until you've a total BOM below $100.

The performance will be interesting, as everything has been compromised, the compression with WIMBoot is lightweight, given that using bit locker on low end devices (Surface 1 RT) didn't have much negative impact on normal useage, I doubt this would either.

The question is, how crappy experience is it, compared to a really crappy android tablet, I mean, this is going in well under the cost of the Nexus7.