ASUS VivoTab RT Review
by Vivek Gowri on October 23, 2012 3:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Asus
- Mobile
- Tablets
- Windows RT
- Vivo Tab
Viewed within a vacuum, the VivoTab RT is a strong first effort from ASUS as part of the new Windows tablet push. It’s a conservative and mature design that has proven itself in the marketplace. It’s a thin tablet with a clean, modern aesthetic that doesn’t push the boundary much. A high quality IPS display, solid performance, decent camera, a well-designed laptop dock, good battery life that becomes awesome when you include the dock - really, there isn’t too much wrong here. It’s a well-rounded, high quality product.
Unfortunately, we can’t evaluate products within a vacuum. The existence of Surface clearly puts all third-party manufacturers on their heels. Having had the opportunity to play (however briefly) with Surface at the launch event in June, it’s simply the one of the most impressive hardware specimens I’ve seen from a design standpoint. Sure, part of the buzz around Surface is the hype machine at work, but it’s not every day that the world’s largest software company decides to jump headfirst into making PC hardware, especially not hardware that looks and feels as impressive as Surface does. It’s on the same experience-first mentality and degree of attention to detail that we typically find in Apple products, except with a completely different design ethos. Apple has gotten so good at executing their designs that consumers and media are collectively jaded about what to expect from them (the 7.6mm thickness of the iPhone 5 barely got a second glance from anyone other than 3GS owners), but Surface is stunning because it’s still fresh. It’s not necessarily as well rounded as the VivoTab RT, though we’ll have to wait for the reviews to really get a good read on Microsoft’s first tablet. Just from what we know thus far though, it’s definitely heavier, thicker, and I’d much rather have the ASUS laptop dock than either the Touch Cover or the Type Cover. The additional battery in the dock is really a killer feature here that I hope doesn’t get lost in the Windows RT hype - having a 2 pound touchscreen Windows notebook with 14 hours of battery life is one of the best things about the switch to ARM. But the VivoTab RT won’t turn heads the same way that Surface will.
Microsoft obviously has a built-in pricing advantage with OS licensing, and can afford to make less on the hardware to push the platform, similar to a console launch. We saw Microsoft play this tactic very successfully with the 360, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see them do something similar and cut into their margins to win on pricing, even if they don't sell at a loss. This puts third party hardware manufacturers at a distinct disadvantage out of the gate with licensing fees for both Windows as well as Office, but ASUS rapidly shifted their pricing targets to beat or at least match (depending on how much you value the laptop dock relative to the Touch Cover) pricing of the equivalent Surface RT, and it seems likely that we’ll see other device companies do the same.
But overall, what I take away from this is how successful Microsoft has been in bridging the gap and getting mobile devices to come as close to true convergence with the personal computer as we have seen thus far. It’s pretty impressive to see how capable the VivoTab RT is as a PC replacement, certainly more so than any previous tablet platform. It’s certainly a great tablet, but it also doubles as a fantastic $600 ultraportable, merging the best parts of the tablet world with the best parts of the PC world. For now at least, that’s as good as it gets.
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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.