well it's the big Windows RT Windows 8 launch day I have two Windows RT devices
remember RT it looks like Windows 8 it
behaves a lot like Windows 8 but it is not quite Windows 8 because Windows RT
is the first operating system that we've
seen from Microsoft ready in every way
for ARM processors the first device we're going to have a look at is the
ASUS Vivo tab RT so this is ASUS's take
on the whole Windows RT Paradigm we have
it in the dark color here so there's also more of a champagne color available
you can see based on the box it's apparently quite slim once we get it
opened we'll obviously be able to validate that unlike most tablets
Windows RT actually takes up a significant amount of the storage space
that is available on the device so there's a little warning here that the
available user capacity of a 32 gig skew will actually be significantly less than
that about half I think that's a little bit pessimistic but they're probably
planning for the worst case scenario so
this is a full-fledged Windows OS guys um TF 600t is the part number it comes
with a T30 that's a teger 3 processor there won't be a 16 gig version
available at all because as you guys can imagine if it was completely full of the
OS and there's no room for apps that wouldn't be very helpful all Windows RT
devices are shipping with a full office
implementation that includes word excel PowerPoint and one note one note being
of particular interest because as a note taking platform tablets are obviously
less than ideal with what we've seen in the past so far with the exception being
maybe something like a Galaxy Note 10.1 that has that uh integrated
stylus okay so there's the hold on hold on let's let's get everything let's get
everything out first so there's the device itself it's very thin uh here's
the documentation the microfiber cloth for cleaning that is included uh what
else we got here warranty card warranty card again includes a
users guide as well that gives you some basic oh actually this is kind of
interesting so there's some gestures left Edge swipe right Edge swipe top
Edge swipe and finger slides scroll up and down zoom out zoom in tap and hold
double tap neat explains the charm bar so we can we can show some of this uh
some of this after okay users manual okay that's enough for
documentation it includes what the heck is that oh neat
okay so you can adapt uh ASUS's uh
charging connector right somewhere where the heck is the charging connector right
here to a USB port that's awesome actually especially given the form
factor of the device and because this is a Windows-based device you will have
full access there's your ASUS charging connector your ASUS charger you will
have full access to the file system that is operating under your tablet OS which
is not something that we've seen in the past on Android without third party app
support and on iOS at all so in terms of
thinness I'm going to go ahead I'm going to do it I'm going to do it I'm going to do the old iPhone 4 thickness comparison
as well as the old iPhone 4 size comparison so this is a 10-in tablet um
it is extremely light actually it's maybe not as not actually yeah no this
is this is extremely light it's very comparable to something like a Galaxy
Tab 10.1 which is uh again a very very
light tablet let's see what ASUS has to say for themselves so Tegra 3 quad core
processor uh super IPS plus ultra bright
178° viewing angle panel 8 megapixel
rear camera that's a 2 megapixel front camera right there Sonic Master Crystal
Pure sound reproduction and the battery life at lasts up to 9 hours NFC is on
board so you can tap and share without boundaries we're waiting for it to boot
up right now there's only one actual button built into uh Windows RT devices
and that is the Windows button right
here on the back you can see they've gone with a hybrid metal and plastic
finish so the metal part is actually here I should just uh what is this this
is an FCC thing maybe I'll leave that one on but this one just covers up the
powered by Windows RT um
etching on the really wow that's really hard to remove
so there's a brushed metal backing and then up at the top and I can pretty much
guarantee you that the antennas are hidden under that uh that housing is a
plastic backing that actually has a really nice grippiness to
it okay that came off so the powered by Windows RT is not actually etched onto
there it's just the ASUS logo and then that brush finish the speakers are built
into what I would say is kind of a funny location because because this tablet as
you can tell from the way that it's set up the way that this button is here and
the webcam is here is meant to be used in portrait mode and the way that I
would most naturally use a tablet in portrait mode is holding it like this
which would perfectly exactly cover up both of the speakers so those are
probably going to be a little bit muffled I would have preferred to see them up here or something like that but
uh I don't know if you pull it like this while you're watching a movie or you
hold it a little bit higher you might be able to get away with uh with not
covering those up so here's the setup process at any rate you can accept the
terms of the Ula after of course carefully reading
them just like any device that you set up that you of course carefully read
here's a few Basics a pick a color scheme Sweet let's go pink and then PC
name will be uh
Vivo input is very
Snappy okay uh we can pick a wireless
access point you know what our wireless give me a set guys cuz our wireless isn't working correctly
here all right so we got connected to Wi-Fi we're just going to use express
settings to set up and you they're going to want you to use a Microsoft account
to sign in okay so I'll I'll enter this for this next part I want to show you
guys a couple of the different keyboard layouts that are available on Windows RT
so this is sort of your classic tablet layout they haven't committed any
cardinal sins here they've added smiley faces which is actually probably more
useful than you'd think um I really like the way they've implemented the number
pad because as much as it's you know you can have a row of numbers up here and
it's convenient to not to press an additional button if you're entering more than one number at a time I I love
this and being able to reach it with just one hand uh they seem to have made
pretty good choices for all of the main symbols here so you got your dash and
your underscore available your asterisk um at sign hashtags all that
good stuff and then they've also got this layout this layout I'm not quite
sure what to think about I think I wish that these bottom parts were were
smaller to go along with the smaller letters and maybe make the letters a bit
bigger um but even with my small hands I can reach all of them and some I've seen
some people complain about this number pad in the middle because it does take
away from how much space is available on the screen but as someone who actually
inputs numbers on a regular basis I don't think I mind it so let's just go
ahead and we'll enter a username and we'll be right back there's a little guide thing it
says uh while we're getting your system ready here's a little guide so you swipe
in from any Edge so swiping in from the right accesses the charms bar which is
your search your Windows key your settings or some other handy stuff there
oh okay so it actually wants me to do it how does it think I'm oriented here
swipe in from any Edge come
on
um oh no it's just timed okay we're
getting your PC ready this will take a few minutes we'll be
back so here we are booted into Windows 8 it's extremely smooth which is nice it
looks like everything's animating at a very fast frame rate it looks like they
just do away with animations that might have ended up choppy so I mean what we
saw especially on earlier iterations of Android is stuff like this would just
kind of like sort of turn itself around like
that but they've just kind of gone NOP we're just going to kind of back it off
and then pop it back up in a way that is oriented more according to how the user
wanted it I want to just show you guys some of the swipe gestures so on the
right you can see search share start devices and settings so a quick setting
that I do want to adjust right now is screen brightness let's Crank that up so
you guys can see a little better I love the way they've implemented things like
volume and screen brightness where you just hold it and then dial it into
wherever you want and then see so with
just like one touch you can almost mute and go all the way to maximum just like
that oh classic little Windows tone for doing
that kind of stuff same thing with brightness so it'll adjust the slider
according to where you are and then you can adjust it from there which is just I
think it's kind of neat you can change your keyboard okay touch keyboard and
handwriting panel you can change your notification settings hide for whatever
else uh once you're actually inside apps and I apologize we actually my phone
tethering is broken broken my stupid iPhone but um you can access your tab
browser from here I've seen this approach complained about because it
requires an extra keystroke but I'm
actually not convinced that it's that bad of an idea because I I don't switch
between tabs all that often when I'm on a mobile device swiping up from the
bottom is also kind of application contextual so in this case it brings up
the browser bar as well as uh your internet settings however you cannot
access all of your internet settings just on the uh on the mobile the modern
UI browser you actually have to use the desktop browser in order to access some
of the more advanced settings so more on that in a moment swiping in from the
right allows you to manage your multitasking so let's go back to the
start menu and there's another way to do that you can use the one button that's
here to go back to start menu as well once you're on the desktop yes it's a
Windows desktop however Windows RT is not backwards compatible with uh
previous Windows applications that are not designed for ARM and every app you
install on this device does have to come from the Windows uh wind the Microsoft
store so internet options that's how you would actually change any of those
options here everything's very smooth though and the touchcreen is extremely
accurate on this particular tablet so I don't think you'll have any difficulty
navigating around and changing your security settings or whatever else that
you need to do from the desktop is where you actually access all of your office
apps as well these haven't been metroed
or modernized so you'll they look just
like the desktop applications I'd really recommend getting something like uh the
keyboard DOC for the uh for the Vivo tab
if you're going to seriously use office but if you're not then you know it's
still nice to have it's nice to have all those tools I personally like the ribbon
interface although not everyone not everyone does but the current iterations
are so much better than the original ones back in 2007 that you can do pretty
much everything which is just just great to have that kind of product acity
available on a tablet I talked about having full access to the uh to the file
structure of the device so you can go into my computer and then you can even
just go like browse your hard drive all your stuff's just there it's just in
like Windows and you know can browse around look around like that can you
zoom oh you can although the way the zooming works is sort of gimpy but we'll
just sort of do away with that for now and pressing this button again gets you
back into the modern UI where they they'
set up a bunch of stuff for you so there's Kindle apps uh pre-installed on
this one so there's a Kindle app available there's a lot of apps that
weren't available yet when reviewers had their initial review units but the store
should be open now but of course we aren't connected to the internet which
will make that demo somewhat difficult so we'll just go back to uh back to the
main UI now we're tethering to cameraman's
phone just to sort of show a little bit of the browser experience so these
aren't super high resolution devices this is only 1366 X 768 it does still
look reasonably sharp though it's not it's not as noticeable as I sort of
would have expected but um it's not an
iPad and it's not a TF700 display where we're talking super super highres
displays zooming and panning around is extremely smooth very responsive um I
don't want you guys to judge the the navigation speed based on what we're
seeing right here because we are Tethered to a phone right now and a room that has just so much interference in it
uh let's go ahead and sort of show what the tab based switching is like so it's
really quick to switch between tabs uh that personally doesn't bother me at all
if you do want to open a new tab you just go like this type in your url or
type in your search so I don't know ponies ponies are great Everyone likes
ponies it helps if you spell it right though ponies and then you just go like
that does a Bing search by default so
yeah we can learn about oh that's a cute Pony uh you know what let's let's lose the
whole Pony thing now let's go back to Metro so let's go to the store Metro not
Metro modern UI let's go back to the store load up the store and uh see if
things look a little bit more densely populated so there you go you got your
Netflix your iHeart Radio Skype Skype better be available um Skype is actually
one that pretty much everyone should install because of the convergence that
I think we're going to see with Skype and uh Windows Live Messenger and all
those sort of messaging apps that are available the one that's it's still doesn't work with is um the the
integrated messenger I mean doesn't work with Google Talk so but we'll see if
that ever happens uh so New York Times more tier one sort of new sites still
need to get applications ready oo remote desktop so that's that's a cool thing to
have available oh another thing to note guys that yes this is a proper browser
so unlike Android and unlike uh unlike
iOS full flash is available on Windows
this is this is Internet Explorer 10 so there's no limitations you will see
flash content and personally it still matters to me um it's flash isn't dead
yet it might be like a dead standard or a dying standard but I still use it so
it's it's nice to have so let's have a look at all the stuff um physically
around the edge of the tablet this is your ejection port for the docking
keyboard this is your micro SD slot here's a micro HDMI port which I
personally think is pretty darn handy to have on a device like this in case
especially yeah it's one of those things if you ever want to do like a PowerPoint presentation um it actually has
PowerPoint unlike other platforms so there's a power button okay there's your
3 and 1/2 in or 3 and half millimet headphone yeah 3 and 1 half inch
headphone jack no big deal 3.5 mm headphone jack there's your volume
rocker and then on the bottom you find there's your power and then there's this
all of this is part of the docking for the keyboard add-on that is available
separately although I would definitely recommend it because as a productivity
tablet Windows RT is a much stronger and more compelling option than what we've
seen from Android and iOS in the past thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Vivo tab don't
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