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Temash or BayTrail Tablets?
I haven't kept up with the tablet market much because I don't have a need for one. If my phone isn't good enough, I use a laptop.
My brother is looking for a tablet for work, and it seems like a good fit for the type of work he will be doing. He wants a "detachable", or tablet which has the option to dock with a keyboard. It also must run Windows so he can use Excel spreadsheets with macros.
The one he is looking at is one of the Asus Transformer models. I told him to wait, because I need to find out if the BayTrail in it is worth using over the Temash. He will likely install games on it, but it will primarily be used for work.
Anyone have useful insight? A specific model of tablet to look for? He is on a very tight budget.
Comments
If he needs Excel, then he needs Windows. That rules out most tablets right away. If he also wants to run anything other than Microsoft software, then that pretty much rules out Windows RT, too, so he should be looking at a Windows 8 tablet.
If he cares about graphics, he wants AMD Temash (A4-1200 or A6-1450). If not, he wants Intel Bay Trail Atom (Atom Z3000 series, Pentium N3000 series, some Celeron-branded that I'm not sure of). The latter will be fine for simple tasks like displaying the desktop or video playback, but I wouldn't trust it for gaming, unless his idea of gaming is on the level of Minesweeper and Solitaire.
He doesn't want previous generation AMD Hondo (Z-series) or Intel Cedar Trail Atom (Z2000 series) unless he's on a very severe budget and finds one very cheap because someone is trying to get rid of them. And he certainly doesn't want Intel Haswell (Core i*-4000 series) or Ivy Bridge (Core i*-3000 series) in a tablet, as that's going to be prone to overheating if you push it much, as games will, not to mention very expensive. Ivy Bridge will have awful battery life, too.
Both Temash and Bay Trail Atom are just now coming to market, so there aren't many options available for either just yet. HP has one of each that is configured pretty well. The AMD:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-Pavilion/F0A23AV?HP-Pavilion-13z-p100-x2-PC&jumpid=cp_r163_us/en/pc_comm/higher-asp/detachables/pavilion13x2-buynow
The Intel:
http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-Pavilion/E4V88AV?HP-Pavilion-11t-h000-x2-PC&jumpid=cp_r163_us/en/pc_comm/higher-asp/detachables/pavilion11x2-buynow
Note that the AMD is 13" while the Intel is 11". I'm not sure why HP did it that way. That makes the AMD option bigger and heavier, but the AMD option also offers a separate hard drive in the keyboard base. The Intel option has a second battery in the keyboard as a standard feature, while in the AMD, it's optional.
Also, don't let the clock speed differences confuse you. While the Intel is clocked at 2 GHz and the AMD at 1 GHz, that only makes the Intel chip about 30% faster on the CPU side. On the graphics side of things, the AMD option is vastly superior.
OT: Does anyone know of a way to buy that computer outside USA? It would be really good for me, but the only place I've found it for sale is HP USA store and they don't ship outside USA /OT
If HP doesn't sell it elsewhere in the world yet, they probably will soon, albeit with fewer configuration options.
If you're looking at detachables, I should warn you not to expect miracles on performance, as you're looking at tablet-level performance. It will very much be usable for Windows, and might even feel decently fast if you're used to hard drives. But on single-threaded CPU performance, a decade-old Athlon 64 would handily beat either of the systems I linked above. The advantage today, of course, is that a single CPU core in those systems burns around 1 W, while the CPU core in that decade-old Athlon 64 had a TDP of 89 W, making it wildly unsuitable for tablets.