In this year’s Taipei International Information Technology Show (popularly known as the Computex Show), the new Windows operating system for tablets, Windows 8, took the limelight with the new Asus Tablet 810. The Asus Tablet 810 also sports the new processor from Intel aka Clover Trail. This makes the Asus tablet to be the first of its kind to sport the new iteration of the mobile Windows 8 operating system as well as the mobile processor by Intel.
According to Intel, the design and structuring of the new processor will bring down the tablet weight to around 680 grams, making it much more portable and user-friendly. The company almost achieves the same with Asus Tablet 810, which weighs around 700 grams. The Clover Trail processor also boosts the battery life of the tablet; with the Asus tablet clocking a decent 8 hours of battery life at one charge, close to Intel’s estimate of 9 hours.
The tablet is equipped with a slightly downgraded screen which has a resolution of 1366 x 768, way lesser than what the market leader iPad sports – a Retina display of 2048 x 1536. This might be a chief buying factor for the users, if Asus prices the 810 close to the new iPad. To complement the Clover Trail processor, the 810 comes with an internal memory of 64 gigabytes and 2 gigabytes of RAM, which is pretty decent for a tablet.
The tablet was open for hand-on experience during the show. The boot time seemed a bit on the slower side, with the start screen taking around 20 seconds to load. Multi-tasking and toggling from a window to another window seemed smooth and applications functioned perfectly. However, the popular game title Cut the Rope seemed to lag a little, with touch gestures taking more time to process than they should.
Since the tablet is still at its beta stage, much functionality was absent. The 8 megapixel camera on the back of the table and the 2 megapixel front-facing camera were not functioning. The networking capabilities of the tablet also couldn’t be tested, since the internet connection at the Computex Show was not fast enough. The on-screen keyboard had strong ergonomics, but the available external keyboard is said to boost the battery life by 5 hours more than the normal tablet battery performance. The launch date for Windows 8 is still unknown, but experts predict it to come out in Q4.
