[Review] Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review–part 3: the performance, the camera and battery life

This is the part 3 of the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials Windows 8 tablet user review. This one is about the performance, the camera and battery life.

Note: If you missed the part 1 and 2, click on the following links to read them.

Part 1: Ease of holding the tablet and look & feel

Part 2: Usability

OK, let’s get on with this section then.

Performance

If you want to find out how measurably fast the tablet is, read this review. I will not go into those tests. I will only talk about how I feel, together with Windows 8.

1) CPU

I am a guy that loves fast computers. This tablet definitely isn't fast. That’s mostly due to the Atom Clovertrail 1.8GHz dual core/hyper threaded CPU in there. The specs wise, it doesn’t seem slow, but Clovertrail is an in-order executed CPU, which makes it slow compared to Core series CPUs.  But I knew that before I bought it.

There was no choice, to be honest. ARM doesn't support full version of Windows 8 and Intel Core series CPUs have terrible battery life, need active cooling and all that adds weight. So we all have to put up with the slowness of the Atom chips. Hopefully Baytrail will fix it.

2) Storage

Anyways, the CPU doesn't seem to be the only thing that is slow in this tablet. The storage medium is eMMC which is solid state alright, but doesn't have the raw speed of an SSD. It's pretty slow, just like a USB flash drive.

3) The OS itself

But Windows 8 modern apps are slow to launch anyways. The video app for example takes about 5 seconds to load a video for the first time. The Windows Store is terrible. It is slow and needs a lot of user interactions to get the smallest thing done.

4) Wi-Fi

Downloads are not so fast. Wi-Fi browsing performance is comparable to my iPhone 4S, sometimes even slower. I was expecting more. The current generation devices have better Wi-Fi performance than iPhone 4S.

The Camera

The camera on a tablet doesn’t make much sense and people taking photos with a tablet look like idiots. But nevertheless, some people would like to see how the camera performs. I captured a video and took some photos with it.

Photos:

		Photos from Dell Latitude 10 Essentials tablet VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Video:

Battery life

I haven't measure the battery life accurately but according to the proper reviews, the battery seems to hold for about 8-10hrs. That's good and you should not expect nothing less from a CPU this slow. In other words, you won't have to worry about the battery life.

Next: bundled bloat ware, Windows 8.1 compatibility, recovery and firmware updates