$214 for an Acer Iconia W4. $229 for a Dell Venue 8 Pro. $193 for a Toshiba Encore WT8. $220 for a Lenovo Miix 2 8. And that’s just the Amazon.com prices. The bargain though is the Acer Iconia W4 64GB at $259.
We’ve seen some offers on 8–inch Windows tablets before but they were short-lived and mainly for hype-generation but it looks like prices have been pushed down permanently now as all the 8-inch tablets compete against each other. Prices at the Microsoft Store are also discounted but not as much as through some resellers at Amazon. The best deal I could find was the Acer Iconia W4 with 64GB sold by Amazon.com for $259.99. The Acer W4 has an HDMI port, good battery life, great screen and comes with a USB OTG adaptor cable so you can get going with USB accessories right out of the box. There’s a range of accessories too. Yeah, it’s not the thinnest or lightest but it’s very capable. For a thin and light solution either the Dell Venue 8 Pro or the Lenovo Miix 2 8. Given the slightly better screen and WiFi on the Dell, the $229 price for a 32GB version is still very good.
Windows 8 Tablets at Amazon.com
While prices for the current generation of tablets are good, where are the promised $99 tablets? The Onda V819i Android tablet running on a Z7935D at about $130 (local price conversion) is said to be getting a free Windows 8 ‘sidegrade’ but as yet I’ve seen nothing about availability although there is this demo video available. (Via)
Apart from this, clearly local information, there’s nothing to be seen in the US and European markets yet.
We’ll keep an eye on pricing and evidence of Z3795-based Windows 8 tablets. Right now it seems that the only action is with Android. The latest Tesco Hudle 2 could be one of them so keep an eye on pricing because the bill of materials for the Android and Windows versions are the same. The Hudle 2 is said to be coming in late Q3.
I would love to get a 7″ Windows 8.1 tablet in the same form-factor as the Google Nexus 7; some people have mentioned that a 7″ form-factor on Windows 8 is not good. Why not? I could live with some minor interface issues to have a PC in the Pocket; the Nexus is essentially a toy!
Those people are just speaking from their own personal use cases and just fail to understand what kind of trade offs others make. Even if you explain, they’ll just blow it off as not making sense and their definition of “productivity” is the only one. I personally have use cases that are worth it for me at several sizes (5″, 7″, 8″, 10″, 11″, etc.).
I seriously doubt you can upgrade the OS in current Onda V819i to Windows 8 since it has only 1GB RAM. That is simply not enough for Windows.
Las week I purchased Toshiba Encore because for $190 it seems to be a very good deal. There is no sign of the promised very cheap Atom tablets from China.
Actually, the latest W8.1 can work with 1GB of RAM… Performance may not be ideal but it will otherwise work…
Mind, MS reduced the minimum system requirements with the latest update to 8.1 with update 1…
So, instead of the minimum being 2GB of RAM and 32GB of Storage, it’s now just 1GB of RAM of 16GB of Storage… and you can get away with even less storage if you take advantage of the new WIMBoot option that can keep most of the installation compressed in a WIM file that also doubles as the recovery image…
Some users of the Asus Transformer Book T100, for example, have already set up WIMBoot and reported the whole installation, including Office, is only around 3GB…
It’s not Atom Z3795, its Atom Z3735. Huge difference. The former is a top-end chip, and the latter is much cheaper.
There’s a difference even between Z3735 chips. The Tesco uses a Atom Z3735D, which is a single channel memory controller 64-bit chip. The Onda V819i uses Z3735E, which is a single channel 32-bit memory controller.