ASUS Vivotab Smart Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,607 words · ~8 min read
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Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASUS Vivo Tab Smart. This is a
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Windows 8 tablet, so it is not an RT
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tablet, which I personally find quite exciting. That means that you are not
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locked into only the applications that you can get on the marketplace in uh in
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Windows 8/ Windows RT. You can install regular desktop applications and use
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them on a tablet even if they're not designed on a tablet, which can give you
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a lot of flexibility. And ASUS has kind of been
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all about flexibility with their tablet offerings, giving you the option, I
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mean, with the original Transformer to add like a keyboard to it and just sort
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of generally cool stuff like that. So, here's the tablet itself. It looks
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pretty much like a tablet. So, not much out of the ordinary there. In terms of
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specs, it's running an Intel Clover Trail Atom processor, two gigs of RAM.
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It has 64 gigs of solidstate storage as
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well as Oh, check that out. It has NFC. No way. That's sweet. Uh, okay. Sorry,
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sorry, sorry. I got distracted. So, it has up to an 8 and 1 half hour battery, an 8 megapixel rear camera. So, that's
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right there, which also has an included flash. I think I'm probably missing some
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specs here. This was kind of amusing to me. They have two of exactly the same
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sticker on the back of the Oh, it's in French. I get it. I couldn't actually
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find any difference because none of the specs are actually in French. Like they
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just put 2G instead of G small O. And uh
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yeah, or should I say Clover Trail because apparently it's Clover View. My
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bad. So it has wireless uh BGN,
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Bluetooth 4.0, uh 2 megapixel front
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camera, and that's pretty much it. That's all I missed. Wow, I was doing
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pretty good. All right, so let's go ahead and have a look at what they
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include in terms of accessories. You've got an ASUS wall wart, which basically
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looks like any other ASUS wall wart. And then you've got a USB to micro USB cable
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that you will plug into that and use as a charging cable. So unlike ASUS's
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Android tablets, we do not have their custom dock connector. See, no dock
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connector on the bottom. It is just using micro USB for charging. So that's
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a bit of a that's a bit of a departure. They include a microfiber cloth with the
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unit, which is very handy because you will probably want to clean it at some
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point, as well as a quick start guide for how to use Windows 8. So, setting up
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for the first time the Windows 8 lock screen. Swiping in from the right to get
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to the charms menu. This is super important. As well as the Windows or
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modern or whatever UI they're calling it now, the UI formerly known as
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Metro. All right, Atom inside. It looks
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like Oh, no. I thought they got away without putting the atom sticker on the unit itself, but they did not. It is on
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the unit once you peel off the plastic covering. You will see that. Sorry, this
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is just taking me a little while to get at. It's kind of tricky. There we go.
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ASUS does such a great job of their tablets. I mean, they're all gorgeous.
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This one's super light. So, it only weighs uh it looks like the actual spec
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is 580 g, which is very, very
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respectable. It has a little bit more heft to it than some of the um than some
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of the super sort of ultra lightweight tablets that I've encountered in the
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past, but it's definitely not as heavy as something like an iPad 3. The power
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button is located up here on the top. So, I was just pressing that to get it
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powered on so we can start the startup process. On the back as well, you can
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see, oh, look at that. They've handily labeled where the NFC um tap is going to
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take place. Because with something like a tablet, if you were to, for example,
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sync it to a Windows phone, then uh
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Slick's not paying attention. There we go. If you were to sync it to a Windows phone, then it could become a guessing
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game of where do I actually tap it? So, they they tell you so that you're going
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to uh you're going to know without too much difficulty. On the side, you find
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your headphone jack as well as your volume up and volume down. On the
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bottom, you find absolutely nothing. And then on the other side, you find your
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charging port as well as aoo. Is that
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what I think it is? No way to know for sure unless I can open it.
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Uhhuh. You know what? We'll be back in a
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moment. That is what I thought it was. We've got HDMI in there as well as micro
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SD expansion on the side. In the time we've been off camera, I've also waited
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for Windows 8 to boot up. So you can see that even though I selected a blue theme
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during my setup, it is actually by signing in to my to my Windows Live
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account or whatever they call it. I used to be passport, what do they call it
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now? I don't even remember. Whatever I signed into my Microsoft account. So now
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all of a sudden my photos are showing up. My theme is correct and I can access
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my Sky Drive and just generally sort of
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there you go, Facebook, all that kind of stuff that I have linked together. So
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things are pretty much good. And unlike Windows RT devices, I can go I can use a
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browser. I can download any application that I desire. So I could go and search
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for I don't know, let's search for
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uh CPU Z or something like that here. So
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keyboard CPU
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dash Z because that seems like a cool application to run on a tablet, right?
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CPU ID. I mean, if you guys are familiar
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with the concept of Windows RT versus Windows 8, then you probably don't need
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me to explain this to you, but I think it's pretty cool anyway. So, let's do
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the 1.62 setup version in English. Download. Now, it's actually pretty
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snappy. Overall, I'm really impressed with the web browsing experience so far
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on this Atom processor, and we're going to find out exactly which Atom processor
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it is. I'd also love for you guys to check out the viewing angle on this IPS
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panel. So, I mean, ASUS again, they do such a great job with their tablets of
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just well, building them well. It's
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like, how do you how do you say it in a way other than that? So, they use an IPS
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panel. They use a good quality uh overall fit and finish to the device.
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Actually, I didn't mention the back is has a nice uh rubberized feel to it. So,
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there's your there's your speaker on the rear as well. I don't think I pointed that out before, but it makes it easy to
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hold on to. I think they've also found a good balance of sort of bezel to screen
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here because it's just wide enough for my thumb to sit here without causing
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problems with touchscreen stuff that I'm trying to do elsewhere, causing
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interference. Like, if I had a thumb sitting here and I tried to do other things. Oh, yeah. It caused problems all
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over the place. No, I don't want an ask toolbar. Next. Install. Sure. Create a
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desktop icon. That should be fine. And don't want to view that. So, let's
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go ahead and go back to
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uh how do I minimize everything? I don't even know. Yeah, that should work. Nope.
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Let's minimize
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it. There we go. So, let's go ahead and
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try launching CPUZ. So, let's find out what kind of CPU we got on here.
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Oh, look at that. They're including their Sonic Master uh uh branding for
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the onboard sound as well. So, it should be slightly better onboard sound than you'd normally get on a tablet. So,
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there we go. We have an Atom Z2760 at 1.8 gigahertz with a core speed
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of 1792, two cores, and four threads with hyperthreading. Our memory is 2
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gigs, and it doesn't actually look like it picks up much other information about
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it, which is uh sort of, I guess, part
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of the course. CPUZ is not really optimized for these platforms anyway. So, there's a lot of information that's
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missing. But, I think that pretty much wraps it up. What's the advantage? It's
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still a tablet. It's still super portable. The battery life is more like
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a tablet where they're quoting eight plus hours of battery life, which is
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really awesome compared to previous Intel processor powered tablets and you
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be are able to actually install whatever applications you want. Don't forget to
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