The Acer Aspire Switch 10V takes the new 11V design and shrinks it down a little to make an overall improvement on the original Switch 10. There’s an Atom X5 (Z8300) on the inside along with a Full HD screen. Hands-on video at the base of this article.
Acer Aspire Switch 10V
Ultramobile computing fans, we have an ARM-based ‘phone’ product here that we need to watch very carefully. The Lumia 950 and 950 XL are likely to be the first Continuum-showcase Windows 10 phones. If you don’t know what Continuum is yet, see this post. The Lumia 950 will connect to a screen via USB-C, while charging, and allow you to run those Universal Apps as large screen optimized experiences. This is what the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is all about and if developers see the potential here then the apps could really start to flow. Here are my thoughts.
You’re looking at a phone with hidden talent. To distill my explanation into a picture, look at this…
The always-on feature called Connected Standby in Windows 8 has been updated for Windows 10. Modern Standby, as it is now known, has support for HDD-based PCs and allows you to disable WiFi during Sleep which will help preserve battery life. Windows 10 also includes easier controls for preventing applications to run in the background and for controlling notifications which also extend to a new Battery Saver mode. I’ve tested the features on a couple of Windows 10 devices (upgrades) and the results have been extremely varied. This Windows 10 feature needs more work but it’s a huge potential advantage to mobile battery life when compared to Windows 8.
Ever since I watched the Windows 10 casting presentation at BUILD 2015 I’ve been quite excited about some of the possibilities that a universal Windows 10 can bring to media casting. Look at the $99 Windows dongles and think about Windows 10 Mobile sticks that could challenge Chromecast and Amazon’s products. WiDi and Miracast are improving and there’s DLNA to consider too.
I’ve done a few tests on Miracast with Windows 10 and the results look better than before but today I took the time to drill down into DIAL and DLNA. It’s good news and bad news at the moment.
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I joined the The Digital Lifestyle podcast this week and had an enjoyable and educational hour with Ian, Garry and Jason.
Did you know you can sync shared OneDrive folders on Windows 10? I didn’t! And how about updating your Lumia to Windows 10? Apparently it’s not quite ready for mainstream yet, but could be soon.
We talk about the Windows 10 upgrade process in the podcast, how smooth it is and how long it takes. How many people have upgraded and how much Windows 10 traffic is flowing on our sites now. I mention that none of my devices have had an ‘organic’ upgrade yet. We talk about Music services too – a big question for many, including me as I try to decide between Microsoft and Google or storage and supply.
It’s an interesting hour and I look forward to joining the TDL podcast again soon.
Listen to the podcast here. (Links, MP3 download etc.)
I recently bought the Lenovo Thinkpad 8 Windows tablet, but not the Thinkpad 8 that was launched in early 2014. The latest version has the high-end Z3795 (Baytrail-T) CPU, 4GB RAM, 128 GB SSD, LTE and runs a 64-bit version of Windows. CPU and disk performance are well above what you’ll find in the early versions. It also has USB 3.0 support which sets it apart from nearly all 8-inch Windows tablets. It all adds up to the lightest, most powerful, portable and flexible desktop PC that I’ve ever used. The best UMPC to date and one that can do real multi-channel full-HD video editing. Update: While writing this article I updated the Thinkpad 8 to Windows 10. See below.
Please, if you are looking at low-cost laptops and reading articles today that say the new Acer Aspire One Cloudbook is a Chromebook competitor, think again. It’s not. A stream of articles published after the launch of the Acer Cloudbook today will have you believe that price is the way to compare between the two laptop segments but they are wrong because even at the same price, the Cloudbook is nothing like a Chromebook. Even if you ignore he Chromebook comparisons there’s another issue. The 16 GB Cloudbook is not exactly going to be barrier-free with Windows.
This post is out of date before I’ve even posted it. As I was finalizing this post, build 10159 appeared and I’m downloading it now. We don’t know what’s in the latest build yet but it’s said to be significant. I’ll update this post with anything that’s affected here and write a new overview after I’ve looked at build 10159.
The ‘beta’ tags have been removed from Store, Music, Maps, Edge and other apps in Windows 10 preview release 10158 and the old Windows 8.1 versions have gone. There are visual tweaks, support for Hello where users have the required hardware and Quiet Hours is back. The Battery indicator shows remaining and time-to-charge figures, the Photos app has been updated and the (desktop) Snipping Tool has a new delay feature. Microsoft Wi-Fi is coming. But there’s little here for tablet users.
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