Okay. So some impressions on this little gem of a tablet.
(Bought for $229 from Amazon last week)
These are the Win8 tabletsI have owned:
Samsung Ativ 500T
Acer W700
Surface 2 with touch cover 2
Dell Venue 8 Pro
I'll run through them very quickly so everyone can compare easily to this little guy:
Samsung 500T: This thing sucked. Worked like garbage. Worst build quality ever, etc... The Intel drivers were so horrific, the thing was unusable on battery power due to the dynamic contrast adjustments. They were set to MAX, and no way to disable. You could load up a nice photo and the face would literally be blown out white. image retention on screen sometimes No thanks.
Acer W700: core i3/i5. Heavy. Worst Speakers Ever. screen suffered *bad* image retention. In addition to being big and heavy, and poor venting areas. What was the point I was always thinking... I don't need the desktop for anything really. I used Photoshop on this ting several times, and it worked. Cool, right? But I didn't need it.
***I actually went with a big Dell laptop here for a while, but that thing was a huge piece of junk. was breaking apart literally in weeks***
Surface 2!
This is a beauty. I loved it. The cover was oh so cool, and the thing screamed quality, and worked oh so fast! I never missed any programs/apps from desktop at all. It's a joy to use. Highly recommended.
Dell Venue8 Pro: I got this because I don't have money and it's less than half the cost of the Surface 2.... Sadly that was my criteria. I have been very pleased however. Smaller screen makes it less useful for occasional word/excel stuff, but it just might be good enough. Screen is nearly the same quality as Surface 2 IMO. and finally I CAN DISABLE DYNAMIC CONTRAST. thank you Intel.
I still have zero use for the desktop, but it is what it is. Would rather have RT any day of the week though.
Things I find poorer than Surface 2 - Build quality. it seems solid enough, but Surface 2 is obviously in a league of its own compared to this.
performance. Bay Trail, is certainly an improvement over the last generation of Atom CPU's, but compared to the Tegra 4 it's lacking all areas. GPU especially, but even things like scrolling, the Surface 2 with Tegra was smoother and quicker. (don't care what benchmarks state, they don't matter in real world usage)
Overall I love the Dell, and I would recommend it to anyone!
On screen keyboard in landscape at this size works AWESOME! I Skype chatted with it for an hour, and had no complaints. At this size it's better than the Surface, or any larger tablet. Great stuff.
Like I said. The display on this is really really nice (make sure to disable Dynamic Contrast in Intel panel). it's supposedly 'low' resolution, but it looks great. resolution is just another spec to me, like a benchmark. (User of 30" 2560x1600 monitor)
Excited to try the active pen, I loved that aspect from the first Samsung tablet. and I used to have an awesome Fujitsu tablet PC.