Couple of weeks back I was ranting about how slow the eMMC storage on these Windows 8 tablets and that was the main cause of lag in them. You really need to have a proper SSD based storage on these tablets to really harness the power of the OS.
A week ago I bought my new Tablet and unfortunately it still came with eMMC storage. But I was hoping that it would be faster than the storage in the previous generation tablets. Today I ran Crystal Disk Mark to confirm it. Here are the results.
Indeed it is, if I was living in the US. In the US, the price of the 32GB model is $349 and 64GB model is $399. If I can make at least $200 from my old tablet, I say that's good enough. I don't want to get the 32GB model though. That would be a downgrade from what I have right now.
The Asus Transformer T100 is ones of the first BayTrail tablets that came out with the launch of Windows 8.1. That $349 price tag includes a hardware keyboard as well. (AFAIK, it lack the addition battery though). Doesn't matter. Even with the Latitude 10, I'm not having problems with the battery life. I am fine having to charge it every night if required. Other than that, the price is the selling point. This price is same as Surface 2 which is ARM based and doesn't come with a keyboard. (You have to pay an additional $120-130 for a hardware keyboard on it.) And this is a convertible tablet, not just a tablet with plugable keyboard. The Surface 2 is not a proper laptop, because it doesn't stay stably on the lap.
Besides, there aren't any other options. Dell has Venue 11 Pro and that's about it. But it is not available for purchase as of today.
If you compare the Asus T100 with the Dell Latitude 10 Essentials, the differences are very noticeable. First, it has a CPU that's more than twice as fast as the one in the Dell. Then the GPU is many times faster. You get the keyboard. You get free Microsoft Office 2013. although it doesn't come preinstalled - a key to install the software is bundled with the package. Nevertheless, you get the best office suite for free. The speakers are very loud - as per reviews. The speakers on the Dell are horrible. It's about 100g lighter as well. The storage is still eMMC, but it would be slightly faster than the one on the Dell. Not sure if the performance difference would be noticeable though. I have always felt that the sluggishness of the Dell was always due to the sluggishness of the storage subsystem, not the CPU. So if that is the case, even a small bump in storage performance would be a godsend. Plus, it comes with Windows 8.1 out of the box. So you don't have to update to Windows 8.1 if you had to do a factory restore.
Only thing you are going to miss is the back facing camera. Who takes photos with a tablet anyways. Ah, and you don't get a full sized USB port on the tablet although one is available on the keyboard so that is not a big deal. I wonder if you can use both of them - the one on the keyboard and the one on the tablet body - at the same time. That would be awesome. I really miss not having multiple USB ports on the Dell.
So, obviously there is no competition between the Dell and the Asus. The Asus wins hands down.
There is one issue though. I don't live in the US. I live in Japan, and in Japan this tablet costs $449 for the 32GB model and $549 for the 64GB model! Ouch!!! That's too much! They want me to pay an extra $150 for the same 64GB tablet?
Sofmap is giving 10% points if we buy it from them, so the price of the tablet drops below $500. But still, I'm not sure that is worth it. I'll wait and see if the prices would drop. Perhaps when more and more shops start selling the tablet, it would become cheaper.
On the other hand, the Surface Pro 2 128GB is going for $870 for some reason. The price in the US is $999. Weird country Japan is!
Intel recently released the new iteration to their ultra low power CPUs known as the Intel Atom CPU. The new iteration is called BayTrail. If you didn't know, it's predecessor was CloverTrail which is the one that's available in most Windows 8 tablets. Unfortunately, that's what's in my tablet too.
BayTrail comes with a huge performance boost.
First, it is a quad core CPU. CloverTrail was a dual core CPU with Hyper-threading support. No Hyper-threading in BayTrail though.
And then comes the biggest improvement: out of order execution. This massively increases performance as it lowers the idling caused by I/O (including the cache accesses).
Then, there is turbo boost as well.
Now it supports DDR3, although the supported speeds are only 1066MHz.
A 1.33GHz (1.8GHz boost) BayTrail gives about half the performance of an ULP Core i5 (dual core) CPU running at 1.6GHz. So it is not that bad. It is way faster than CloverTrail. Even the GPU on it is the HD4000 which is only one generation behind the latest Haswell CPUs. Previously, the ATOM SoC was using a 3rd party GPU called PowerVR by Imagination Tech.
So, it seems like we have a winner, especially on the tablet front. But there is a big issue. "Storage performance". The tablets coming with the BayTrail CPUs are using the slow eMMC storage solution, not SATA based SSDs which you would typically find in PCs. eMMC is still solid state storage, but they are about 10 times slower than modern SSDs. Even though the iPad is also using eMMC, iOS is optimized for ARM platform so much that you don't get much of an issue as you would get when running Windows. Windows needs a proper SSD.
I don't know if this is a limitation with BayTrail or if they tablet manufacturers are opting for the cheaper storage to increase margins. If it is the former, we have no choice. But if it is the latter, the manufacturers are making a huge mistake because once people get fed up by seeing every bad move the manufacturers take to make an extra dime, they are going to take their business elsewhere.(i.e. buy an iPad). They are going to lose their profits trying to make higher profits. This is why even though Apple products are pricy, people tend to buy more and more of them. (I've asked Ryan Shrout about this, so hopefully he will find the answer. I really hope it is the latter, which means there is a chance that at least one manufacturer would come to their senses and release a BayTrail based with storage solution based on desktop class SSDs.)
I'm sure the newer eMMC storage is faster than what was offered with the CloverTrail based tablets. (Head down to the bottom of this page for performance numbers of the Asus T100 Transformer Book. Compare with the VivoTab Smart which is a CloverTrail based tablet.) But I doubt the improvements, if any, would be large enough to warrant a pleasant experience on a tablet running Windows 8.1. For example, last night I checked the CPU usage of my tablet while doing a lot of things. Even though the CPU usage didn't go past 50%, it still felt sluggish. Installing GIMP took so long that I let it install and went to sleep.
Just for reference, check out how the eMMC storage solution in my tablet performs compared to the Samsung 840 series SSD on my desktop PC.
Tablet
Desktop PC
What a difference! Especially when it comes to small files. I'm sure, even with the CloverTrail CPU inside my tablet, if it could be equipped with a decent SSD, I won't notice how slow the CPU is.
Yesterday I dragged my wife down to Kawasaki to check up on Windows 8 tablets. I would not usually go check stuck up; instead I would simply order stuff online. Heck, shipping is free most of the times. Why spend money for the train when I can get it delivered to home. *To self* I'm digressing. Back on track buddy.
There weren't many tablets available. I was specifically looking at the Atom Clovertrail based tablets. I found only 2 actually. The Asus Vivo Tab Smart and Acer Iconia W510D. Both of them were pretty expensive but that is usually the case at these retail outlets. You can find them for much cheaper if you buy them online. I was going to order one online anyways, but there were few things I wanted to check. That’s the purpose of this visit. I wanted to know how they felt hands-on.
1. Was it light enough?
Yes they both weigh 580g which is slightly lighter than the IPad Retina model (which is about 650g). iPad mini is much lighter though.
I tried out an Acer W700 few months ago and felt that it was too difficult to hold because of the weight. Unfortunately, the Surface Pro weighs pretty much the same. :/
2. Is the screen resolution suitable?
I was specifically looking for a low resolution screen because otherwise the desktop components will be very small to touch. 1366x768 it Is. Both tablets were giving great viewing angles since both of them have IPS displays. Besides, I don't think Atom SOCs can support any larger a screens.
I have been holding out till they released Windows 8 to decide on which tablet to buy. I really like having Windows 8 as the operating system because it would make switching between the Desktop PC and the Tablet seamless. All the other tablet OSes have a compromised OS - and the manufacturers admit that too. But they say that it is for the best user experience.
The problems with the current tablets
Let's look at a few of those examples where the current line of Tablets do badly.
I know that Flash is not great, but all of the live cricket streams are using players that a built on the flash player and I cannot just continue watching a cricket match on the bed on any of the tablets out there.
You cannot simply plug in your flash drive and read the contents of it straight from the tablet. Everything out there requires you to have a separate PC for doing just that.
Let me give you an example.
Couple of weeks ago, we went to see the Hakkeijima Sea Paradise. There were discount coupons for foreigners, where you have to download the coupon, print it out and hand show at the ticket counter for a JPY500 worth of discount from each ticket. We usually print documents from the Convenient Store close by. It costs only JPY10 per print. Anyways, I copied the PDF file (which I saved from Google Chrome) to the flash drive and was planning to take the print out on the way. When I inserted the pen drive, it could not detect the PDF file. Somehow it had gotten corrupted. We were already late for the train. I had to run all the way back to the apartment, copy a working PDF file and come back to take the print out. If I had a tablet with me, I didn't have to go all the way back the apartment to do that. I could have simply copied it from the Tablet.
