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  • meacupla - Tuesday, August 29, 2023 - link

    I hope they at least use a 4:3 or 3:2 screen on it with minimum 400nits brightness.
    16:9 and 16:10 screens on 2-in-1 laptops feel cramped when in portrait mode.

    It would be fantastic, if it could be easily disassembled for maintenance and upgrading RAM+SSD.

    Having seen GPD Win Mini, I know it's possible to cram a full laptop into a 7" form factor, at the cost of thickness. I hope they don't go for some ridiculously large screen size for a tablet.
  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, August 29, 2023 - link

    I measured the promo image, got 168x109 units. Maybe 16:10?
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    Edges on the screen part of the image are very blurry, but I get about 570x370 for it which is 15.5:10 16:10 would be 592x370 (or 570x356); so either they're using a screen with a weird aspect ratio, the image isn't to scale, or it's sufficiently early in the design that they're using something mocked up in photochop by someone who didn't know/care what the exact aspect ratio is intended to be.
  • yannigr2 - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    Just use the image in the video.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    What video? If AT has started including non-garbage videos at some point by using the same html/css as the trash I've long since crap blocked they've guaranteed that I'll never see them as a result.
  • meacupla - Friday, September 1, 2023 - link

    the bilibili hyperlink "presentation in china" is a video.
    There are a lot of interesting products in it.
  • Zeratul56 - Tuesday, August 29, 2023 - link

    I’m a big fan of the windows tablet niche. My last purchase was the Dell 9315 2 in 1. Would be interesting to see how an AMD based system would stack up in terms of form factor and performance.
  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, August 29, 2023 - link

    I have never owned a tablet, preferring to use small laptops instead. I'm ready to finally jump on x86 2-in-1, and this seems like it could do the job. With a 7840U the price is going to be pretty high at launch though.
  • AdditionalPylons - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    I've personally never found a need for a tablet, but I'm currently contemplating getting an Asus Rog Ally for a little bit of gaming but also for light video editing (Davinci Resolve) while hooked up to a larger screen, keyboard and mouse. The Rog Ally's performance for the money is incredible and even beats most mini-PCs, while also including screen and battery.
    The Lenovo Legion Go is similar, but has detachable controllers like the Nintendo Switch, which makes it more useful as a computer/tablet.
    With Minisforum also entering this space it gets quite interesting actually! Performance-wise I suspect a tablet will have worse cooling than a handheld gaming console, but the 7840U APU has the AI compute units which may be useful for some non-gaming use cases.
  • meacupla - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    Yeah, I just saw the Legion Go specs. Z1 Extreme, 8" 2560x1600 144Hz screen and detachable controllers is very close to perfect for myself.
  • yannigr2 - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    Throw a gaming controller into the package and you can advertise it as a gaming tablet.
  • sjkpublic@gmail.com - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    Cooling is an issue. Imagine doing a CPU/GPU intensive task with the 7840U. A cooling fan will rev up and be noticeable for a tablet. For tablet users that will be a different experience. Will be interesting to see how minisforum handles the heat.
  • nandnandnand - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    They could make it fanless, nothing stopping them, but performance will be left on the table.

    The dope option would be to use Frore AirJet, which has been seen in the ZOTAC PI430AJ Pico using an i3-N300. I don't know if 2x AirJet Minis are enough for a 7840U at the normal TDP though.
  • NextGen_Gamer - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    @nandnandnand - Two wouldn't be enough, if they were able to fit 4-6 on a small heatsink, that maybe could work? The Intel Core i3 N300 has just a small TDP of 7-Watts, whereas the Ryzen 7 7840U can be configured from 15-30-Watts. So, even in its lowest mode, it would still be substantially higher. Of course, comparing TDPs between Intel and AMD is always hard, *but* with the N300 being Intel's E-cores only, I would guess it sticks closer to the 7-Watts than the regular Intel i5/i7/i9 CPUs (?)
  • wr3zzz - Thursday, August 31, 2023 - link

    Who would want a tablet using 4 fans? I don't even want a tablet using 1 fan let alone 4-6.
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, August 31, 2023 - link

    AirJet is very different from a fan, with higher performance while being much quieter and relatively slim, but much more expensive. They are planning to use it in smartphones eventually, so it can probably be used in gaming handhelds, tablets, etc. I doubt that using more than 2 of them is feasible in a tablet form factor, but we'll find out in the future.
  • meacupla - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    AFAIK, AirJet has 5W cooling per 27mm unit. Using 9 of them attached to a heatpipe or vapor chamber should allow for 45W-ish TDP.
  • lemurbutton - Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - link

    It would be awful.

    And Apple Silicon M1 chip can idle at 7mw. This Ryzen CPU would be terrible compared to Apple Silicon.
  • erinadreno - Thursday, August 31, 2023 - link

    At least it's doing something instead of only being able to stay idling
  • wr3zzz - Thursday, August 31, 2023 - link

    Every tablet I've ever bought pretty much ended up collecting dusts. The 7" and 8" tablets got replaced as soon as 6.7" phones became the norm. Tablets larger than 10" are not light enough to be used as always carry devices and not powerful or large enough for productivity. I also kept buying 2in1 devices thinking things will be different but 99% of the time they are used in notebook mode.
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, August 31, 2023 - link

    I read a lot of text and comics on laptops/traditional displays. I figure one of the 12-15.6 inch 2-in-1s would work better for that, even if I'm always sitting down or propping it up while using it. I have not tried it though.
  • wr3zzz - Friday, September 1, 2023 - link

    I've bought so many 2-in-1 and tablets thinking the same thing, none worked to my satisfaction. My conclusion is that as a reader you really don't want anything that's heavier than 400 grams, ideally under 300 grams. Anything heavier you will end up reading it propped up somewhere. No 2-in-1 today come even close and the lightest 10-11" tablet still weights 450 grams with most over 500. So you either end up paying more for the same utility of a cheaper device or an extra device with limited utility.
  • meacupla - Friday, September 1, 2023 - link

    The way to use 12~14" sized 2-in-1 is to lay on your side while in bed, and have it in an orientation that doesn't block the air intake.

    For 7~12" tablets, get an adjustable tablet arm.

    But I do agree that if you want to hold one in your hand, 7" and under <300g is just about perfect.
  • ET1 Gulf War Vet - Friday, September 1, 2023 - link

    I travel a lot with a company laptop, a gaming laptop and a Lenovo Chrome tablet. The tablet can be on before takeoff all the way to the final destination and paired with my Bose 700 headphones life is good. A laptop must be powered off before takeoff and can't be turned on until the plane reaches a certain altitude. Not to mention the screen on your laptop might be one reclined seat from being shattered. Tablets can also run over 10 hours on a single charge so they have many great use cases.
  • qlum - Friday, September 1, 2023 - link

    This looks interesting to me at least, as long as it works on linux. I currently use a cheap chuwi as a tabletpc and the only reason it doesn't fully replace my laptop is that it just isn't performant Other options right now don't seem great but if minisforum pulls it off that could be a great option for media consumption on my bed and as a compact laptop when I travel.
  • abufrejoval - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link

    I actually started with a Notion Ink Adam and then went through near every size and make over the last 13 years, with a Google Nexus 10 being in use by one of my kids until even the last replacement battery started to go.

    The last Android tablet I used was a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 as a daily breakfast table reader and OLED TV on trips, but it broke when I slipped on a patch of ice end of last year.

    That was a near perfect device for me, which I had intended to use for many more years and it came fully featured with LTE and an SDcard slot for only €600, but it turned out near impossible to replace within that price range, as Samsung didn't offer 10" OLED any more and the bigger units were too costly for my taste.

    Since the weight wasn't that important on the breakfast table and I'd take a notebook with me on trips anyway I instead switched to a convertible laptop with a great 14" OLED at less than Samsung was asking for a tablet.

    It takes care of avoiding those tiny unavoidable bits of splatter that make a keyboard unattractive on a breakfast table while giving a proper viewing distance for older eyes and it also serves the OLED TV and laptop use cases in a single device. What it doesn't do too great is upright reading e.g. for PDFs.

    Battery life isn't a day either, but I rarely spend an entire day away from a socket.

    I've always had keyboard options or stands for the tablets, as screen keyboards are just too much of a slow-down, but I do prefer Android touch gestures to anything available on Windows.

    I actually use all, the screen, the touch pad and the mouse while power-reading, because each has it's ergonomic niche in terms of interaction, but the lack of touch customization on Windows (vs. mouse and touchpad) is just terrible, even with add-on products for gesture control.

    I also had the original Asus Transformer TF101 tablet, which had a rather solid keyboard attachment turning the tablet into much of an Android notebook and included an extra battery, both for endurance and balance, which might actually still be my preferred form factor, if it could also fold into a keyboard stand convertible today.

    My impression is that they'll have to spring some really juicy extra to get me to buy another device, because I am perhaps not entirely happy with the Asus Vivobook convertible, but too happy to split notebook and tablet back into two and paying double.

    And yes, judging from a Ryzen 7 5800U notebook I also own, I'd probably prefer a Phoenix Zen 4c device over the Alder-Lake i7-12700H on the Vivobook, but again not enough to fork out a kiloeuro on an upgrade.

    I guess it's for people like me that they created technical obsolescence into today's hardware, because otherwise we'd never by replacements. Unlike with the first couple of Android tablet generations, SoC performance has long ceased to be an issue.

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