Packaging
The packaging of the tablet is way superior to that of the Latitude 10. Both the outside of it and inside of it. When I first held the tablet, I felt it was smaller and sleeker than the Latitude 10 as well. You can see in the following pic, how the T100 compares to my old tablet.
Exterior
It is about 100 grams lighter as well. The weightlessness was obvious right from the very beginning. However there is one problem. The backside of the tablet is glossy and finger print prone. And it is slippery if you place it on cloth. In that regard, the Latitude 10 was better as it had a textured back with was easy to grip.
First time booting up
When I pressed the power button at first, it would not turn on. The battery was completely dead. So I plugged it into my PC to charge and pressed the power button. It turned on alright. The initial setup screen of Windows 8 came up and I did the usual thing. When I got to the desktop and tried several things, tablet suddenly turned off. I pressed the power button again and even though it came on at first, it didn't even get to the desktop before turning off again. I thought that the power given from the USB port of the PC was not enough and the tablet was draining the battery faster than the PC could charge it. When I tried the actual charger the problem went away. Luckily, it did not break Windows 8. Things can go terribly bad if you didn't shutdown Windows properly. (Even with the wall charger, it took a long time to charge completely. I let it charge overnight later on.)
Before ordering this tablet, the biggest thing that concerned me was whether 32GB was going to be enough for me. After analyzing things and reading a review posted on kakaku.com, I felt it was enough.
Keyboard Dock
Speaker quality
The biggest issue I had with the Latitude 10 was with the speakers. It was not loud enough. The quality was horrible as well. Every review was praising the audio on the Asus and it sure is very loud. The quality is also good enough for me. But when you ramp up the volume to max, the tablet starts to vibrate. You can feel it in your hands. It's probably what you get form a plastic tablet. If it was made of metal, you probably wouldn't feel it. I didn't get a chance to use the headphone port yet. The audio chip is provided by Related and the driver installs a control panel in which you can hardly do anything. Not funny!!
(Will post a video comparing the audio levels between the Latitude 10 and this later.)
Software
The one I bought came with the Japanese Windows 8.1 OS installed. Good news is that you can easily change the display language of it to English. But only English, it seems. The experience is not as 100% smooth as a original English OS though. The fonts are a little strange at certain places. But this was something I knew before hand. No big deal.
However, instead of Office, it came with a free 32GB Micro SD card. It's not that fast though. Just class4. But something is better than nothing. I'm going to use it to store all my data and the use the internal storage just for apps.
The tablet came with unlimited or 1TB free Asus Web Storage. I don't really understand if it is really unlimited because I also got a message about 2GB is free. Whether that 2GB free limit is for normal users or for the owners of this tablet is unclear to me. I am syncing the Micro SD card to it. It also comes with a metro app.
Updating firmware
But then I went into a little bit of trouble.
You see, the Bit-locker Drive Encryption is automatically enabled on this tablet. (You can disable it in Windows but it said it would take a long time, so I left it as it is) So if you plug the drive to some other PC (I don't think you can do that for the tablet though), you cannot access the data without a recovery key. The key is stored in BIOS and it is unique to this tablet (I believe. Not sure how it actually works though). The key is validated when you have UEFI Secure Boot enabled. For some reason, when I updated the firmware, that setting got disabled. So, when Windows booted up, it asked me for the recovery key. I had no idea what the recovery key was, but there was a way to find it. You see, the tablet is registered under your Windows Live account. Maybe it only starts encrypting when you register it with your Windows Live ID. Maybe that's why it was slow at first. Anyways, I was able to recover the Bit-locker recovery key using this link and entered it in the box provided. It worked and I could enter Windows normally. Perhaps if I rebooted, entered BIOS and enabled Secure Boot, it would have worked without me needing to put in the recovery key. I don't know what could have happened if I restored the factory image in this situation. I'm glad I didn't have to do that.
(In all that chaos, I forgot to take a screenshot!)
Factory restore
Talking about factory restore, unlike the Latitude 10, it is using Windows' own backup and recovery functionality. I believe the Dell was also using it, but it had a separate layer which could screw up things. You can simply use Refresh or Reset on the Asus to send it back to the beginning. That's great! No bloat required!!!
After the BIOS update, the tablet was much snappier. It could be that Bit-locker had finished encrypting stuff and indexing service had finished indexing the drive. I don't care really. If it is snappier than the old one, that's is all that I care.
Performance
I'll just talk about the performance compared to the Dell. If you want to get an idea about the absolute performance figures, read this Anandtech review.
The app launching speed is better than the Latitude 10. The apps respond faster as well. I wish there was a better browser though. IE is great for touch but as a browser, it is inferior to Chrome. Chrome sucks in the UI department. The network performance is also great. Unfortunately, my router supports only the 2.4GHz band so I cannot get the full speed of the tablet. Actually, I cannot get the full speed of any wireless device I have in the household. Should I get a dual band router from the points I got when I bought the tablet? Boot times are unchanged. The Dell was very quick to boot up. Battery life also seems better on the Asus, but I have no idea how better it is yet.
Storage
There was about 18GB free space left on the internal storage at first. Now I have 14GB left. I think I can manage. It's mot as if I'm going to install games on it. I might install Visual Studio on it though. That would be the biggest thing that I might install. I don't have Office so I don't think I will install it ever.
Conclusion
I've only played with the tablet for one day and I might find more issues or good things about the tablet in the coming days. I will surely talk about them when there is something noteworthy. Until then, the only issues I have with this tablet are,
- The glossy back
- Microsoft Office Home/Student Edition was not included
- Cannot connect a USB drive directly to the tablet as it is
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