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Just picked up a T100, and I'm super happy with it. I haven't tried running Eclipse or Visual Studio on it yet (I kinda wanna do some personal projects using this), but everything else I've tried doesn't feel sluggish at all. Battery life is pretty monstrous too. Gonna throw Steam on it and download a couple indie games to see how those go. It's kinda weird, really... even though I've been going back and forth on what personal laptop to get, I was pretty insistent on it having Windows 8 instead of RT, Chrome OS, or Android. And now that I have this in a nice tablet form, I'm more inclined to try out a bunch of metro apps instead of falling back on all the desktop stuff I've been used to and that I was expecting to stick to. The one thing I'll point out for anybody else with a T100: if you get a weird F.lux-like color cast on the screen in the Mail app or when reading PDFs in the Reader app, find the "ASUS Reading Mode" program (actually a desktop application skinned to look like a metro one) and change it or turn it off. Edit: Oh, and one more use case thing I'm coming around to. Before this, I was pretty down on the concept of a laptop with a touchscreen, since I thought it would feel really awkward to be reaching across the keyboard to swipe around with your finger. But this is the right size that, with the dock attached, I can still cradle the tablet like I would without a dock and use it that way, and then simply reach down to use the keyboard as needed. 404notfound fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Oct 31, 2013 |
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Oct 31, 2013 01:25
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rcman50166 posted:I don't know how much you multi-task but I really hope it isn't this much: That's pretty reassuring. Going to wait for the Venue Pro 11 though with its higher res screen.
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Oct 31, 2013 11:59
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Rottbott posted:I'm probably mad for doing this but I got a Surface Pro 2 (256 GB) as my first 'laptop'. Had it about a week now, so far I'm really pleased with it. It's small and light enough to be nice for browsing/email on the sofa, powerful enough to run games and Visual Studio, and the pen is pretty good for drawing stuff too. How does it handle the Occulus?
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Oct 31, 2013 13:43
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Got my SP2 the other day, and I absolutely love it. Battery life seems to be sitting at around 6-8 hours, and I'll probly be getting the Power Cover when that comes out later. Honestly the only thing I wish was better is the speaker loudness, but maybe there's a way to fix that by installing the Realtek drivers manually. One of my favorite things about having actual Windows 8.1 is being able to run f.lux, which makes it much better to use the tablet for late-night reading.
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Oct 31, 2013 22:09
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One cool thing I noticed about the T100, and I don't know if this was intentional or not: it has two speakers on the sides of the back, set slightly below center. They're just in the right place that if you're cradling the tablet in your hands in a landscape orientation, your cupped hands will amplify the sound coming back towards you.
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Nov 1, 2013 09:03
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404notfound posted:One cool thing I noticed about the T100, and I don't know if this was intentional or not: it has two speakers on the sides of the back, set slightly below center. They're just in the right place that if you're cradling the tablet in your hands in a landscape orientation, your cupped hands will amplify the sound coming back towards you. I noticed that too. since my last review I have disabled (uninstalled, really) Asus Smart Gesture to get rid of the swiping features on the touchpad, so now it's just normal. I also found my first bug. The up volume button will only raise the volume all the way to 100% It could just be mine though. I'm sure Asus knows all about it. It hasn't been annoying enough to stop loving the tablet since there are two other ways to control volume.
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Nov 1, 2013 11:38
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Thinking about picking up the Surface Pro 2 with 128gb and type cover. That price is a tad hard to swallow though.
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Nov 1, 2013 16:50
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Hughmoris posted:Thinking about picking up the Surface Pro 2 with 128gb and type cover. That price is a tad hard to swallow though. Basically all I need is one non-Internet person to tell me "gently caress the price and just buy one" before I just go ahead and do that, because I went cheap on my last device and ended up getting burned. As my last several posts in this thread have all said, I'm still waiting on more Bay Trail devices before I do it but it's haaaaaaard.  I'd probably either go for the 64GB one to avoid hating myself or the 256GB one to get the extra RAM, though. fake-edit: the 256GB and 512GB devices are apparently both on back-order, shiiiiiiiiiit
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Nov 1, 2013 16:57
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I think the Surface 2 is only really viable in 256gb configs, at least for me - the 512 is giant jump in price for just 256gb more of storage, and the 128 only has 4gb ram which I don't see holding up well. The 64gb version is just too little all around. The biggest knock against it, other than price, is that it's a really poor device to actually use as a laptop, in your lap. For me, this isn't a problem, because even with regular laptops I use a little padded lapdesk when I'm sitting on the sofa or bed, and the Surface works fine on that too. I've always done that, but I realize that there are some folks who really just love typing away on laptops right on their lap and if you're one of them Surface probably isn't for you. Otherwise, the two position stand addresses most of my issues with screen placement - it's not as flexible as a hinge, sure, but it works for me - and in some ways it's much easier to use on small flat surfaces like an airplane tray table (I fly a ton) compared to even the Macbook Air. Surface works just fine on desks too. Make sure you pack an external mouse (also something I do anyway, I don't like any trackpads, even the Air's, but that's me). All in all, for me to justify the Surface Pro 2 price I had to consider it my primary "notebook" - if I still need to haul around a regular notebook when I travel then it's pretty pointless and I might as well go with a cheap T100 or Venue to watch movies and crap on. Fortunately the Pro 2 is powerful enough to handle that - with 8gb Ram - and when hooked up to a regular wireless kb/m and desktop monitor it's like any modern PC. So if you aren't going to have a problem with the actual "laptop" ergonomics then go for it. The screen is great, it's fast, it's pretty decent as a regular tablet (if a tad heavy for one hand), it runs full Windows 8.1 so you've got access to pretty much any software package you need....at the end of the day there's no device that is a perfect tablet and a perfect notebook and this one tilts more towards the middle ground. That's what makes it a hard sell I think - you really need to use one for a few days to figure out if it's gonna bug you or not.
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Nov 1, 2013 18:46
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Ixian posted:and the 128 only has 4gb ram which I don't see holding up well I've not had any issues using it with Photoshop and Manga Studio for drawing while running other stuff in the background. I'm not sure what your workload is but unless you're planning to open some big rear end files I don't see how 4GB wouldn't hold up for most people. Windows 8(.1) handles memory really well compared to older versions, as they've redone a lot of how memory management works with stuff like start on demand, and if you use IE11 over Chrome you'll end up having a smaller memory footprint when you have a decent amount of tabs open.
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Nov 1, 2013 19:56
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935 posted:Is there anything stopping me from installing Visual Studio or Eclipse? Would these IDEs work just the same as on any other desktop computer? I've been using VS2012 and more recently VS2013 on my SurfacePro since April, as my sole development machine (I work at Microsoft in the VisualStudio team). I'm very happy using VS on the SurfacePro. Other devs on the team can't understand how I can bear to work on a single 10.6" screen when they use double or triple 22"+ monitors. Maybe I just have smaller ideas than them  How is it to use VS with touchscreen vs mouse? Touch is brilliant for doing WindowsPhone/WinRT development since you can touch the emulator! I like using it for opening tabs. With the built-in scrollbar extension in VS2013 that's now a good wide target for touch. But much of the UI prefers mouse or trackpad, so about 50% of the time I plug in a mouse when I'm using my SurfacePro at a desk.
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Nov 1, 2013 21:01
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Mujaji posted:How does it handle the Occulus? It has run every game I've thrown at it so far. Visual Studio is pretty nice, I actually like using the pen over a mouse for work, although a separate keyboard is obviously essential.
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Nov 2, 2013 00:05
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Dumb question but how is the SD card handled? Can I install programs on it or is it just handle file storage like music and photos?
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Nov 2, 2013 01:03
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It should be handled as a drive just like in Windows 7 and before. I don't think there is a provision to install Windows Store apps on it but you can install and run desktop applications on it or any other USB mass storage device.
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Nov 2, 2013 01:16
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Kenshirou posted:I've not had any issues using it with Photoshop and Manga Studio for drawing while running other stuff in the background. I'm not sure what your workload is but unless you're planning to open some big rear end files I don't see how 4GB wouldn't hold up for most people. Windows 8(.1) handles memory really well compared to older versions, as they've redone a lot of how memory management works with stuff like start on demand, and if you use IE11 over Chrome you'll end up having a smaller memory footprint when you have a decent amount of tabs open. I run Visual Studio 2012, which depending on which app I am working on can be a real problem with less than 8, and loath IE11 - Chrome was actually what I was thinking of when I mentioned the issue as it can be a bit of a hog. I realize I'm not an average case - my biggest problem with the 128 was the storage space itself.
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Nov 2, 2013 01:32
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Ixian posted:I run Visual Studio 2012, which depending on which app I am working on can be a real problem with less than 8, and loath IE11 - Chrome was actually what I was thinking of when I mentioned the issue as it can be a bit of a hog. Yeah for serious softdev it makes sense to have more space and RAM. I just wanted to make sure people don't think the 4GB is too little for regular usage. Also if you want more space 64GB SDXC cards aren't too expensive, which is what I went ahead and did.
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Nov 2, 2013 04:16
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Ixian posted:I run Visual Studio 2012, which depending on which app I am working on can be a real problem with less than 8, and loath IE11 - Chrome was actually what I was thinking of when I mentioned the issue as it can be a bit of a hog. Why do you need more than 128Gb? I'm actually curious. I'm a serious software developer/gamer and I've been living on bootcamp partitions and SSDs for a couple years sized at 120gb and less. All my music is in the cloud, why store videos local. With 120 you can easily get Visual studio/unity and steam installed with several 10Gb games. Steam makes re installing a game such a snap, just delete and then next time you want to play a game you just to wait an hour for it to DL again.
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Nov 2, 2013 14:37
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Kenshirou posted:people don't think the 4GB is too little for regular usage. 4 is fine. If you run 30+ tabs of chrome while developing you will have an issue. If you try to run two seperate visual studio's doing heavy work or run a virtual machine you will have an issue. 4GB will play games and develop software just fine, don't worry about it.
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Nov 2, 2013 14:38
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Stick100 posted:4 is fine. If you run 30+ tabs of chrome while developing you will have an issue. If you try to run two seperate visual studio's doing heavy work or run a virtual machine you will have an issue. Not sure why you quoted me when I was saying 4 is fine. Anyways the one thing someone needs to make is a good podcatcher. The ones on the store aren't as good as Downcast or Pocketcasts, and right now I'm using iTunes simply because it syncs with my iPhone and desktop.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:40
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Cautionary tale time: I picked up a Venue 8 Pro because an 8" full Windows tablet with Office and a pen digitizer was a dream come true. The reality of the matter was a different matter entirely. The hardware was admittedly lovely, and it was light and grippy in my hands. The buttons were very responsive. While the Bay Trail processor did fine for running most anything I was planning on using it for (i.e. not gaming), the touch detection was awful. I could hardly navigate on the thing using touch (it would either not recognize the touch as a click, randomly treat it as a double click, or misplace the touch point entirely). Then I tried the digitizer pen, and immediately decided to return it. Quite frankly, it was unusable. In painting programs it wasn't too awful, but I wanted to be able to use OneNote for notetaking (I'm a Surface Pro user, so this is important to me: I simply wanted to shed some bulk), but the results are unreadable. The pen would start "inking" whenever it was anywhere near the screen, the lines were extremely jagged, and because of the first problem, you would have to lift the pen an inch, drop it straight to the glass, draw a stroke, and lift it straight back up (any angle and it keeps inking) to write. Even with that kind of spergy micromanagement of the inking function, the results were still beyond terrible. How bad is click detection with the pen? Just hovering it over the "add page" button in OneNote caused it to open 12 new pages with nary a tap required. Every time I'd try to delete one with the pen it would ink all over the place or do other random things (I finally had to delete the pages from my desktop, after fighting with the tablet for almost fifteen minutes). Not me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfi6IQ6MCN8 This has apparently been a huge issue, and many of the first orders that were shipped are being RMA'd or returned outright to Dell. When I went to cancel my order there (I picked up a second one at WalMart for my son to use [OneNote is a godsend for home education], and when I went to return it I discovered that almost every single one they sold was being brought back as defective or unusable), they tried to hard-sell me on keeping it by offering massive discounts on the hardware if I'd only change my mind. A discounted paperweight is still a paperweight, however. Buyer beware! (One other note: palm rejection didn't seem to work at all with the pen. So much fail.) Let Them Eat Cake fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 18:17
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Let Them Eat Cake posted:Cautionary tale time: Other then the pen, was it a solid user experience? I wouldn't use a digitizer pen anyways, so it might still be a good purchase.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:31
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If you want to use a bluetooth mouse. I found the touch input only marginally better than the pen input: I could almost navigate the metro interface, but had as many "misses" as accurate touch detections. If anything, recalibrating the touchscreen made the issue worse.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:33
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Let Them Eat Cake posted:
Are you talking about the free code in the box? Because it should be the full version of Office Home And Student 2013.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:56
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Let Them Eat Cake posted:Cautionary tale time: Paul Thurrott mentioned that for some inexplicable reason the preinstalled version of office is the trial that you have to activate with a tiny slip of paper that's somewhere in the box.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:56
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Thanks for the quick review of the Venue 8 Pro. I just cancelled my order with Dell which was inexplicably delayed until the 24th of this month anyway. There goes my dream of a small windows tablet with digitizer.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:44
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So many mixed reviews for the Surface Pro 2.
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Nov 3, 2013 00:18
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Let Them Eat Cake posted:Cautionary tale time: Thanks for that, I'm definitely going to wait for reviews on the 11 inch. I would think the bad detection has to do with the synaptics digitiser they're using.
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Nov 3, 2013 01:34
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Maneki Neko posted:Paul Thurrott mentioned that for some inexplicable reason the preinstalled version of office is the trial that you have to activate with a tiny slip of paper that's somewhere in the box. Oh snap, I didn't notice this.
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Nov 3, 2013 01:37
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Yeah, getting the included office is also weird on the T100. If I hadn't known for sure it was supposed to come with a free copy of Office, I wouldn't have looked around and found the slip of paper with the CD key.
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Nov 3, 2013 04:41
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Tried running Lightroom on my T100 just to see how it would perform. Actually doesn't run too bad, but the small screen pretty much makes it impossible to really have a good idea of what's going on when you edit a picture. Next test: Visual Studio 
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Nov 3, 2013 05:41
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/7478/microsoft-surface-pro-2-firmware-update-improves-battery-life Pretty crazy that a firmware fix could make that big of a difference. 15-25% boost in battery life on their benchmarks
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Nov 3, 2013 22:14
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I currently have an Acer Iconia W500 (practically a dinosaur in the x86 tablet world) that I've had for a while now. It came from the factory with Win7, but I upgraded to Win8 almost as soon as the OS was released. While it actually runs 8 better than 7, the device has always been a bit of an underperformer (especially with media). It has a 1GHz dual-core AMD C-50 CPU and 2GB RAM with a 32GB SSD. I'm looking to upgrade, but there are so many choices that I'm kind of boggled on how to proceed. Would any of you guys have a recommendation? The main thing I'm looking for are 10" or higher screen size, preferably with a keyboard dock, since this is basically my laptop. Oz fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Nov 4, 2013 |
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Nov 4, 2013 05:25
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Oz posted:I'm looking to upgrade, but there are so many choices that I'm kind of boggled on how to proceed. Would any of you guys have a recommendation? Alot of people are loving the Transformer T100 Call Me Charlie posted:I posted a review of it on the last page. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3575393#post420740497
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Nov 4, 2013 06:08
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Does anyone know what the warranties are like on these things? I'm on vacation in Manhattan and my laptop died (it was on its last legs; I was hoping it would last until at least Boxing Day). It's an ancient Acer i3 dual core that overheats constantly and gives about two hours on a charge, down from 8 when I first got it, so it's long overdue for a replacement. Aside from the usual content consumption I make music, but even four or five year old machines are powerful enough to run my programs, and something like the T100 seems like a good replacement (ideally I'd like one with a slightly higher resolution / DPI but whatever). Lord knows it can't be worse than this thing - the 2GB of RAM is a little bit of a hit but still manageable. Do any of them have a decent international warranty or should I wait until I get back to Glorious Motherland to buy one? The link on the T100 product page, for example, leads nowhere. Also it's kind of weird Toshiba doesn't offer a 64 GB version of the Encore, nor a keyboard. From what I can read, 32GB Windows Pro tablets leave about 12 GB free which isn't a lot after one installs a few apps and games. They're certainly a lot cheaper than the Helix I've been looking at. WorldWarWonderful fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Nov 4, 2013 |
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Nov 4, 2013 11:55
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For those of you wanting the Asus T100, at least wait for impressions of the Dell Venue 11 Pro. The res on the T100 is seriously like 1366 x 768, whereas it should be around 1920x1080.
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Nov 4, 2013 16:49
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WorldWarWonderful posted:Also it's kind of weird Toshiba doesn't offer a 64 GB version of the Encore, nor a keyboard. From what I can read, 32GB Windows Pro tablets leave about 12 GB free which isn't a lot after one installs a few apps and games. They're certainly a lot cheaper than the Helix I've been looking at. I think the idea behind it is you can use a microsd card and the cloud to make up for the lack of built in space. Lolcano Eruption posted:For those of you wanting the Asus T100, at least wait for impressions of the Dell Venue 11 Pro. The res on the T100 is seriously like 1366 x 768, whereas it should be around 1920x1080. It's also $100 more and doesn't come with a keyboard dock. That's not to say it isn't worth it but it's seems to be in a different category.
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Nov 4, 2013 16:58
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I've been doing my research and I think I might be going with the Venue 8 Pro. I've sold off my iPad and netted $320 for the whole package, so I could absolutely afford the Venue 8 Pro and continue my stupid infatuation with shiny things with screens. Question, though - what's the case market like? Anything smart-cover-like? The only ones I see on Amazon are screen protectors and those universal 8 inch tablet cases which are almost always designed for a specific tablet, and I can't imagine it's designed for the Venue 8.
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Nov 4, 2013 17:06
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Protocol7 posted:I've been doing my research and I think I might be going with the Venue 8 Pro. I've sold off my iPad and netted $320 for the whole package, so I could absolutely afford the Venue 8 Pro and continue my stupid infatuation with shiny things with screens. Might want to do a little more research considering there's someone on this page saying they have one and it's garbage.
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Nov 4, 2013 18:55
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Protocol7 posted:I've been doing my research and I think I might be going with the Venue 8 Pro. I've sold off my iPad and netted $320 for the whole package, so I could absolutely afford the Venue 8 Pro and continue my stupid infatuation with shiny things with screens. You might consider the Lenovo Miix 8 as well, same price. I don't know if reviews are out yet or if it's available yet, they show the Dell Venue 8 as pre-order as well but you can still get it places. http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Lenovo-Miix-8-Inch-Touchscreen-Tablet-32-GB/productID.288025800
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Nov 4, 2013 19:08
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I suppose I trust Lenovo slightly more than Dell. At the same price point, should probably buy from the manufacturer that isn't the butt of several jokes.
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Nov 4, 2013 21:05
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