Hands on With ASUS' Tablet 600 & Windows RT
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 4, 2012 9:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- Asus
- Windows 8
- Computex 2012
Earlier today ASUS announced its first Windows RT device, the Tablet 600. Based on NVIDIA's Tegra 3 SoC (T30), the Tablet 600 features a 10.1-inch 1366 x 768 IPS display and an optional keyboard dock with trackpad and integrated battery. Earlier tonight I had the opportunity to play with ASUS' Tablet 600. Check out the gallery below for more shots of the 600.
In short, the build and feel of the device are both what we've come to expect from ASUS. The display looks awesome, and Tegra 3 felt reasonably quick (albeit not perfectly smooth) running Windows RT. Drivers still need tweaking however as the platform is far from final. Still no word on pricing or availability.
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Solidstate89 - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
My point is between Apple and Google, Microsoft has more experience working with ARM architecture than those two combined. Even if it was with WinCE it's not like that experience is utterly worthless with WinNT.tuxRoller - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link
The problem, as I see it, is that both Android and ios are running basically their desktop kernels. In the case of darwin they can leverage around 20 years of continuous work, while Android can do the same with Linux. They haven't been forced to recreate a new kernel for the mobile space thus they can leverage their vast knowledge of those two kernels.So, a companies past experience with an architecture counts for less than the experience their specific software has had with said platform.
Klimax - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link
NT kernel can run on any platform MS needs. It ran on MIPS,PPC or Alpha, so they know how to port it to other platforms.Mainly HAL and low kernel needs porting. Rest of stack and subsystems need only such changes as required by goals - like optimisation. (besides of recompilation)
So they have much more experience then other two companies... Considering first ports were early 90s for original Windows NT.
Note: ref: p.37 of Windows Internals edition 6th.
tuxRoller - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link
I understand your point but respectfully disagree.While msft may have been using a cross architecture toolchain internally, I'm not aware of serious prior efforts to use NT on architectures other than the desktop/server variety.
So,, as I said, both Apple and Goog have been working with their particular kernels constantly for the past l, say, seven years or so, while we don't know how long msft has been working hard on getting nt to the mobile space. The fact that they even had a separate kernel for embedded work (admittedly a rt one) tells me that nt might not have been given much thought prior to the releases of ips/android.
As for company experience, these are companies not people. They all can by all the expertise they need, so I wouldn't give any of them any special lead in that department.
kmmatney - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
This would almost work for me, and I can certainly live with the processing power of the Tegra while undocked. However it would be really nice if there was some way to have a Core i5 in the docking station and it could switch over to the faster processor when docked (and have more RAM available as well). That would drive the price way up, but it really what I'd like to see for this to fully replace my normal laptop.snoozemode - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
How do you switch between different hardware in a blink? You would have to have 2 Windows licenses and then somehow keep them fully synced with eachother. Nah, not a very good idea imo.The Transformer Book sounds like a better alternative for you.
Ananke - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
This should be at most $300 retail in September, otherwise is dead on arrival.IPad, which I hate, is the best buy money-wise.
Then come a legion of Android tablets, that are working well anyway.