The Asus VivoTab Note 8 is neat new entry in the Window 8.1 tablet market. It has a lot to offer at a very compelling price.
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It comes boxed with a charger, micro-USB power cable, some printed doc, a quick start guide, warranty, support info and a license for MS Office Home & Student 2013 edition. It also features a stylus and Wacom digitizer built-in, a nice 8 inch IPS display, and very decent battery life and performance from the Intel Atom Z3740 Quad-Core 1.3 GHz CPU. All of this comes at a very aggressive price point (a year ago tablets of this nature were selling for 2-3 times current pricing!). If you are in the market for a Windows 8 tablet, this unit is definitely worth consideration!
The 1200x800 8 inch IPS display has a tall vertical (portrait) or wide screen format, depending on how you position the tablet (3:2 aspect ratio). It's plenty bright, nice for videos, and the text is sharp. The resolution is a pretty good match for the display size, keeping text large enough to be readable. The built-in Wacom digitizer features 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity.
The stylus will activate the screen from as far away as an inch or so and the palm rejection is very good. The stylus really is useful, works well, and is a definite plus for this tablet. (And it stores conveniently in the tablet itself as with Samsung's earlier models, which is definitely the right design choice.)
The display is very nice to myour eyes, having good contrast and bright colors (and being plenty bright as mentioned earlier).
The Intel Atom Z3740 CPU performs very well and in use the tablet feels quick and snappy nearly all the time.
Hardware Notes:
- Includes dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.
- Includes a microSD card with OS recovery software. (Remove and keep in a safe place!)
- Ports: One micro-USB, one 3.5 mm Headphone, one microSD card. No HDMI.
- GPS hardware on-board is Broadcom GNSS.
Usage notes:
- Making handwritten notes with MS One Note on this tablet is actually easy and useful. - Drawing diagrams and annotating them works fairly well (for simple things, anyway).
- Included Home Office means you have some serious app power on-board out of box for productive work.
- Not impressed by the "cameras," but as an avid photographer, I never am.
- As you would expect, "desktop mode" is not the preferred mode, however, thanks to the digitizer stylus, it is actually usable. Still, as a tablet, the metro/modern interface is much easier to use.
- As with most tablets, speakers are OK, not great. Use headphones or external speakers for best sound.
- Some nice security features like secure boot, disk/data encryption, and so forth available.
- Can use an OTG USB cable (not included) to connect USB devices.
- Has Miracast capability, but I have no compatible displays, so unable to test this feature.
- Includes 1,000 GB of Web Storage free for one year. Plus some free SkyDrive (MS) cloud storage as well.
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