ASUS VivoTab RT Review
by Vivek Gowri on October 23, 2012 3:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Asus
- Mobile
- Tablets
- Windows RT
- Vivo Tab
In this day and age of “pixel density over all”, most of the RT tablets being launched with WXGA panels, and none of them seem to be worse off for it. In the case of the VivoTab RT, it’s a 10.1” Super IPS+ panel with a resolution of 1366x768. This is a similar panel to the one found in the Transformer Prime, except with a different aspect ratio and resolution (the Prime was 1280x800). As expected, the panel quality is excellent - very bright, great viewing angles, and very good colour reproduction. Combined with the vibrancy of the Modern UI, it just looks fantastic.
Performance-wise, this is pretty good. I’d like to caution that we don’t have a way to do our standard colour gamut and colour accuracy tests on Windows RT yet, so for right now we’re limited to brightness and contrast. Max brightness is 554 nits, which if you hadn’t realized, is really, really bright. Unfortunately, if you leave adaptive brightness enabled (the setting is buried in power profiles) it’ll max out indoors at just over 200 nits, which means you end up keeping the VivoTab RT at maximum brightness for the most part with that on. The contrast ratio is just under 1000:1, so in line with the rest of the top end devices on the market (the contrast ratio at 200 nits is 932:1, so very close to the numbers at max brightness). These numbers aren’t off the charts ridiculous like we saw with the Transformer Prime, but point to a very high quality display that still performs well in outdoor settings.
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frostyfiredude - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Surface RT has a 10% larger display, but a 30% larger battery. Processor power usage should remain constant even with the larger display, so the power usage won't actually go up 10%, but somewhere lower like 7 or 8%.Considering those two, wouldn't it make sense that Surface RT actually gets greater battery life than an un-docked VivoTab RT? Supposedly Surface engineers are hitting 12 hours of usage with it, which seems about right to me at 18-33% greater life than the Vivo RT here.
ssiu - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
"but even compared to Clover Trail, Tegra 3 is not that fast""But given how well RT runs on quad-core Cortex A9, I’m just eager to see shipping devices with faster SoCs - Krait and Clover Trail in the coming weeks, A15 in the not-too distant future. "
I already think "Atom == slow" (poor experience with early netbook). If Windows RT tablets are slower than Windows 8 Atom tablets than I don't know why anyone would choose the former. Even if Krait or A15 is a bit faster than Clover Trail, personally I'd still choose x86 compatibility.
Urizane - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Early netbook slowness depends on more than just the CPU. A large majority of early netbooks had very little RAM as well as slow hard drives. These days, there's a lot more RAM as well as solid state storage. I remember old Atom 330 machines that you could upgrade from 1 GB of RAM to 2 GB that made a pretty sizeable difference in day-to-day use. Upgrading to an SSD makes application load times even better. The CPU wasn't fast, but it also wasn't the only reason people hated early netbooks.Impulses - Friday, October 26, 2012 - link
More RAM and a SSD worked wonders even for first gen Atom netbooks (single core)... For a tablet workflow it's not really any worse than current ARM SoC, now if you're trying to use it as a laptop replacement that's another story. I think that term is gonna get thrown around too easily with these hybrid Win RT devices...Even looking past the dire lack of apps (beyond Office), raw performance isn't where it needs to be to make such a concept reality, performance's obviously not gonna be there until A15/S4 Pro/next gen Atom. Laptop alternative might be the more accurate term, tho it's all obviously very dependent on your particular needs.
powerarmour - Thursday, October 25, 2012 - link
You need to bear in mind the graphics capabilities of Tegra 3 vs Clover Trail, Clover Trail is looking like it's going to be a mess on those regards, with Intel yet again failing to deliver a PowerVR driver of any decent quality.What good is a slightly better CPU, when the only thing 3D it can run is the Metro desktop?
Relic74 - Tuesday, January 1, 2013 - link
I just bought the Asus 810c Vivo, though I to have had bad experience with a Atom CPU netbook from Nokia I am quite impressed as to how snappy the OS is. I'm a programmer so the only desktop apps I really use are Netbeans, Java SDK, FileZilla, Bittorent, OpenOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, Thunderbird, Firefox, XAMPP and Google Earth. All run extremely well but I can't express to you guys enough how fast Windows 8 fly's on this system and that battery, wow, 17.5 hours. I literary charge it ounce every 4 days. As a road machine it's bar none one of the best laptops I have ever owned. I'm digging the Vivo a lot and I'm starting to appreciate Microsoft tablet vision.I see how a lot of you get caught up in benchmarks but when you travel as much as I do it's all about longevity, my other laptop is a Lenovo X220T and even with a batter slice I still barely get about 7 hours.
Flunk - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
This review is great and it's good to see ARM powered Windows in a real device... But I (and I'm sure other readers) would love to see a review of the newly announced Asus Zenbook U500VZ. It sounds like a really interesting device, and touch sounds a little strange on a 15" device.Just hoping you guys do a review, you guys are one of the most reputable sources for reviews.
dananski - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
30% CPU usage from typing in Word 2013 doesn't surprise me - I've had 2013 on my new i7 desktop for a while and I sometimes get lags while typing in Word or clicking around in Excel. Don't try to move the windows around the screen - some very dodgy performance issues there; I used the feedback button to highlight a few.I wonder if these performance issues will make it into the release version. Back when I got Office 2007 there were a few times when performance went terrible in Excel, which they fixed in SP1. Here's hoping that's not going to be the case again...
cmdrdredd - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Might compete well with a Transformer Infinity in benchmarks but it needs apps.B3an - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Nice review. And i agree with everything said in it. This looks like a good device and i'd easily choose it over an iPad or Android tablet, but i'll likely go with a Win 8/x86 tablet.