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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
68 Comments
View All Comments
N4g4rok - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
This review definitely made my view of Windows 8/RT tablets a little more optimistic. I'm still set on the Surface Pro or some other x86 capable Win8 Tablet, providing the price is right.Good to know RT is starting out so well. Let's hope the developers jump on it quickly.
andykins - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I'm really optimistic and excited about Win8/RT :Dtipoo - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Interesting that it goes from a wide lead in Sunspider to such a loss in the other tests, if I'm not mistaken the x86 IE10 does not have that kind of variance. So I wonder if it has to do with Tegra 3s memory bandwidth becoming an issue, or something else. However if it can beat the Nexus 7 by such a margin with a similar Tegra 3 that says good things about ARM IE10.lowlymarine - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Actually, that's right in line with x86 IE10. On my Core i3-based ASUS laptop, IE10 crushes every other browser at Sunspider but is only about half as fast as Chrome at Kraken and V8/Octane.Given these results and the results from the iPhone 5 review, it's clear that IE and Safari are locked in a "who can cheat more at Sunspider" contest.
VivekGowri - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Yeah, basically this. It's not much of a credible benchmark anymore, too many people are starting to optimize very heavily for it in software.The1nchicago - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
This is the ONLY blog site I visit where I truly believe Anand opinion is not biased. I got blessed out by people for saying the Ipad Retina was not the greatest business tool. Glad someone shares my view in a sense.JKflipflop98 - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
I think you mean that his bias matches your own.augiem - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
"Side note: in Windows 8, particularly for normal notebook and desktop users, this is an entirely overblown issue - ... but people who claim that Windows 8 will ruin their desktops just sound ignorant to me. But I digress."This does not belong in a review of this tablet. And calling people ignorant who don't agree with you on how their workflow is affected by the changes to the UI is totally inappropriate.
Boogaloo - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
If you've actually used win8 you'd agree with what he's saying. It's literally exactly the same as windows 7, except with a fancy startbar. The only way someone would profess something different is based on ignorance (which isn't stupidity, it's lack of knowledge).Pirks - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
only slowpokes and lame/dumb oldfags keep saying Metro "ruins" somethingthey will slowly get it that they are wrong and the noise will disappear
don't pay attention to them. I use Win8 RTM for more than a month already and I know what I'm talking about.