Windows tablet for media and DOM4

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Ok…so I might end up buying one of the Surface Pro’s on sale for $699.

But, I was hoping there was a cheaper alternative for what I want, which is:

  1. Media tablet - for Zinio, pdf’s, netflix, internet, etc.

  2. Play Dom4 and a few of my turn based wargames.

  3. Need a USB port of some kind or bluetooth so I can attach a wireless mouse and use that for my games.

  4. That’s it. I really want a portable device to play Dom4 whenever and wherever I want and also for some other wargames I never have time to play at home.

I realize a surface pro is probably the best bet with the most power but is there anything else out there that might be capable for me at this time under $600?

2

Since one of your requirements is to play a windows-based game, no, the surface pro is it.

3

Well…I found the Acer Iconia W700. It has an i3 3227U. 4GBs of ram. 64GGB SSD. Intel HD4000. It has a full size 3.0 USB port. And, it’s 11.6". The size is tempting as I played with one of the original 11.6" tabs last year and liked the size. It is $679. Now I just have to read some reviews. I dont need a keyboard or anything like that, just a nice big screen for some windows war/strategy portable gaming.

4

Don’t see why you would buy that when you can get a surface pro for essentially the same price. I guess it has a bit better battery life, but batteries on all the first gen win8 x86 tablets are horrible.

5

Side note: it runs fine under WINE (like many other TB strat titles, such as JA2, CC2:ABTF, TOAW, etc)

6

There are Atom Baytrail tablets coming or already out that are a lot cheaper, the question is baytrail powerful enough for the games you want to play? Here is a nice review from Asus transformer , but it’s not using the top of the line Baytrail CPU not aware of one in the market but that should change in the near future.

7

that Transformer has a barfy 1366x768 screen. The Surface Pro 2 and that Iconia have 1080p screens.

8

You can think of the bay trail atoms as essentially mobile core2duo CPUs from 2007 or thereabouts. They’re easily twice as fast as the previous atom generation, and are completely usable in the desktop windows environment, particularly paired with a SSD, but they don’t really compare to modern CPUs. The GPUs are much better than the intel graphics decellerators in the c2d, though.

Bay trail computers are essentially netbooks that don’t completely drain your soul with poor performance. They’re fine for mobile use including mobile games, and may actually turn out to be really great HTPCs. I would do my research before buying one for desktop windows gaming.

9

Well…I went and ordered a Dell XPS 18. Got the i5 version and will upgrade the SSD drive and get a little more ram. Very excited for this to show up…bigger is better!