News - The ASUS VivoTab ME400, a £399 Windows 8 tablet

[Noli]

Tech enthusiasts have been disappointed that many Windows 8 tablets have been announced with sky-high pricing. Acer has made noises about addressing this market opportunity but it looks like ASUS will gain first mover advantage.

Er, not really. In fact the exact opposite - Acer were first with the Acer W510 which has been available for a while now.
Similar specs - same CPU, 64GB, same res etc.

You can get it for £476 and this includes the keyboard dock. The Asus+keyboard is £480 so similar price.
Whilst not a soft cover, the dock on the Acer has a full size USB port and near doubles the battery life (anantech measure real world usage of 14.5 hours).

Reasonable reviews (smooth, easily powerful enough for browsing, office etc, great battery)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6522/t...rs-w510-tested

Personally, my only reservation is that this Clovertrail cpu has to be paired with eMMC memory I think. So you can't just replace with a 256GB SSD, which is what I'd want. That means that you are stuck at 64GB and after OS and recovery partitions, that means only 30GB free to use on the 64GB eMMC!

[tickedon]

Personally, my only reservation is that this Clovertrail cpu has to be paired with eMMC memory I think. So you can't just replace with a 256GB SSD, which is what I'd want. That means that you are stuck at 64GB and after OS and recovery partitions, that means only 30GB free to use on the 64GB eMMC!

No tablet that I'm aware of so far has user-upgradeable memory... it's all soldered to the board usually!

Asus has a nice SDXC supporting microSD slot. It's incredibly tempting at this price, and I prefer its case and looks much more than the Acer!

[Noli]

No tablet that I'm aware of so far has user-upgradeable memory... it's all soldered to the board usually!

Are you sure about that? What about the intel core based tablets like the Acer W700 or the Samsung Ativ Smart PC Pro (and many others)?

They are listed as having SSDs e.g.
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/t...XE700T1C-A01US

So unless they're soldered or totally inaccessible, I presumed they might be user replaceable to a smart user.
They are, after all, normal x86 computers in tablet form.

I know they're a step up in price, weight, thickness, performance etc but a lifetime 30GB storage limitation with eMMC is a bummer to me. A core i5 tablet is overkill in some ways too, but brings more use case scenarios despite the reduced battery life.

Intel's next gen CPUs (Haswell and the successor to Clovertrail - can't remember its code name now) will possibly bridge the issue of power vs battery life a lot better. But I'm not sure I can wait!

[kingpotnoodle]

I would be interested to see a side by side.

Because honestly the RT isn't slow. The only thing I've found that makes it flinch is using Word Art in powerpoint, it's not keen on that.

There where a bunch of videos on YouTube showing how slow it was in office preview, a lot of thats been fixed, also the slowness can be caused by updates in the background, which thanks to the amazing oversite, you've no idea are happening unless you open task man.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6522/t...-w510-tested/4

The CPU part of Clovertrail is better than Tegra... the GPU is another matter, it's fast enough for desktop apparently but not much good for games. And of course both are pathetic next to a Core i series.

[Tokensalad]

Thanks for that crossy, I had a very quick look online but couldn't find anything.
Hopefully they will have the sense to bundle one with the tablet, at least we only have 1 week before we find out for sure!

(tried to post the amazon url but I am new and not allowed but search for Brand new usb a 2.0 female to Micro usb)

here's a link to the very cheap adapter I got for my me400. I can understand why people are bitchin about the atom, but I think that they are talking about Windows 7 performance. Windows 8 transforms the experience (it did on the the acer iconia w500 I had). Did an Office side by side with a colleague yesterday and the performance against an i5 was comparable. I'm a happy to do a few tests if people are interested.

[GeorgeStorm]

Where can you get the Acer W510 including keyboard dock for £476 by the way?
Looking for a tablet for my Mum and like the idea of W8 but they tend to be rather pricey

[Noli]

Where can you get the Acer W510 including keyboard dock for £476 by the way?

Google "Acer W510"
Click on 'Shopping'
Click on 'Total Price'

http://www.okobe.co.uk/ws/product/Ac...9390?ref=1q4bs

http://www.ballicom.co.uk/ntl0mek001...n.p855784.html

[KeyboardDemon]

You know this is an atom which will run dog slow by comparison to the i5 right?

As far as I'm aware, devices like this are aimed at content consumption and not production. It is ideally suited to someone that wants to surf, keep in contact with friends and relatives, youtube and following the football scores while watching your team on the TV etc... And not for photo/video editing, CAD or gaming etc... It would be great for my wife as these cover all of the sorts of things she does. I'd like one too, but two in our household might be taking things too far!

[M_Taylor40]

(tried to post the amazon url but I am new and not allowed but search for Brand new usb a 2.0 female to Micro usb)

here's a link to the very cheap adapter I got for my me400.

Thanks for that Tokensalad! Exactly what I was looking for and not a ridiculous price, definately be buying one of those along with a ME400, the Surface Pro is just taking too long and this does what I need.