wumpus
1981
Well, I’ve used iOS, Android, and Win8 extensively as tablets. In fact, I use all three for at least an hour every day. It’s my job.
On my nightstand I have:
- Bay Trail tablet
- Nexus 7 (2013)
- Nexus 7 (2012, cellular)
- Surface Pro 2
- iPad 4
- iPhone 5
And I pretty much grab them at random to do what I need to do, which is 90% of the time, browsing the web.
There is absolutely no question that when it comes to actual keyboard use on a tablet, Win8 clobbers the field. I mean, it isn’t even close.
If you want to run real games, that’s going to be tough on a tablet or ultralight touch laptop depending on your definition of “real”. Do you mean Battlefield 4 by “real”, or Mark of the Ninja?
I’m primarily annoyed that tasks that are workable on the iPad aren’t on my Windows laptop if I’m using the touch screen. Like text selection, as I mentioned. Screw whether it’s “supposed to be” great or not, the touch interface should not be inferior to an iPad unless I’m doing stuff that I can’t really do on an iPad at all. For things like web browsing, it ought to be similar.
Scrolling seems to have gotten better, it used to be that if I wanted to scroll a browser window in Firefox, I had to have the keyboard focus on the search box. Otherwise it would try and highlight a block of text when I swiped upward instead of scrolling. I’m not sure if the change is Windows 8.1 or a Firefox update. That used to make web browsing on this thing without a mouse unbearable.
Right now I have Civ V, Space Rangers HD, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, and XCom installed on this laptop. I’ve only really run Civ V of those so far, and it does fairly well. There are some lighter laptops that will handle all of that, but none of them have touch screens.
wumpus
1983
Wow you are trying to use Firefox on a touch Windows machine? There’s your problem right there.
The only decent touch browser is IE11. Firefox and Chrome are disasters in touch. Absolute and total disasters. Awful scrolling, barely responsive, no understanding of or concessions for touch design whatsoever.
In desktop mode with a mouse they are fine of course.
LMN8R
1984
wumpus! Help :-)
Also curious about Mark of the Ninja.
That’s the issue right there - almost all Windows software sucks with a touch interface. I have issues with Windows itself, most of which are tamed by Start8 and Modern Mix, but the real problem with my Windows touch experience is the software.
Gendal
1986
You might think wumpus is exaggerating but he is not. I really want chrome on my surface pro but its completely unusable. At least with the dev version of chrome they now have a separate touch version and it might actually be usable in the future. That’s If they don’t get sidetracked by porting the entire Chrome OS to Windows 8 Metro which is what they currently seem to be doing. It’s of course completely broken as well for now.
Wow. Why would anyone do this?
wumpus
1988
The good news is that IE10 and now, IE11, are really solid browsers in their own right. They come into their own in touch, and I love the hell out of them in full screen Metro. Best touch browser there is, I swear to God, and I use mobile safari and mobile chrome daily.
On desktop with mouse, Chrome all the way of course. But you do not give up anything significant (performance, features, etc) by using IE11 in touch IMO. It’s all very HTML5-y and standards compliant. Hell, IE11 even supports SPDY now…
wumpus
1989
(Oddly enough, Mobile Safari actually has the best performance in our testing, by far. Assuming iOS 7. Chrome on Android has… a lot… of, uh, peculiarities in JavaScript perf.)
wumpus
1990
Mark of the Ninja isn’t that smooth on Haswell, which is over 2x as fast, and I remember dropping it down to 720p. So likely not good.
Kind of a weirdness of that particular game since other much harder core games run great on Haswell 4400/4600 GPU. GRID 2, and Marvel LEGO for example, runs absolutely fantastic with everything turned on, only the most minor occasional hitches in the cityscape. All at 720p of course, anyone who tests games at higher than 720p on Haswell has completely lost touch with the way living rooms work.
I dunno, I was not planning to game much on the Bay Trail machine. Loving the machine though, the Transformer T100 is a real winner. The only way to improve it would be a slightly better 1080p display, and I think the Bay Trail GPU could handle that in 2D no problem.
LMN8R
1991
At the very least, I’m sure Bay Trail is fast enough to run the SNES emulator on the store :-P even the original Surface RT was fast enough to do that.
Have you looked around at all for keyboard covers? It would definitely be cramped, but I know a bunch exist for the Galaxy Tab 8, and would make non-touch gaming at least a bit more feasible. Wondering if any of the existing Android bluetooth keyboard covers would fit the venue 8 pro.
prolix
1992
Your nightstand is ridiculous.
stusser
1996
mmmmm tummy butter sounds delicious
On my trip I copied some videos clips from a friend’s phone, and tried to view them. Every time - every time - I tried to open a video, the crappy video player “modern” app wanted me to log into my Microsoft account before it would play the video. For a purely local file. Because it wanted to look at the internet to tell me about what other videos I could buy or rent.
I hate Microsoft so much.
Just move to country not supported by Xbox Video then you get a player that only plays local files and doesn’t require login. I’m sorry but is easy to change the default player to WMP, but to be fair it Windows should ask that the first you play a file from the desktop, it did that for me, but from the complains I read it does not seem to be universal behavior.
rei
1999
Is there no policing of the Windows 8 app store? In the trending/top apps were some puzzle/match crap things made by some foreigner guy using stolen Disney art assets. Who approves this shit?
Only making money matters, off course.
