Walmart's $99 crap-let will make people hate Windows 8.1 even more Walmart, that well-known purveyor of the finest America has to offer, will flog a $99 Windows 8 tablet for this year's Black Friday. Youtube Video As you'd expect at that price, the E Fun Nextbook is an utter dog: it has a 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor with 1GB of RAM – the bare minimum for Windows 8.1 to function. The tablet …
I bought an HP Stream 7 Win 8.1 tablet for about $100 Cdn. The audio on the headphone socket was full of buzzing noise, as if somebody made a design error in the audio circuits. After several GB of updates and a few days use, the wifi became unreliable. Sent it back for a refund.
Tried again. With the 2nd example, the audio on the headphone socket was full of buzzing noise, as if somebody made a design error in the audio circuits. Maybe interference of some sort. Very annoying.
So we have a tablet that is essentially unusable with headphones.
Chocolate teapot.
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This is where Apple has one thing right. They *never* let their computer OS run on under powered crud hardware like that.
It always frustrates me when I see computers sold in high street stores like Walmart or PC World which are just crud. Junk. Put into a box to look like a computer, but sold as such trivial prices it is clearly trash inside. Scrapped to the bone. And, of course, the average home user doesn't know the difference. They listen to the salesman and thinks this cheap pile of junk is what the Microsoft OS is about.
So - what kind of bundled crudware is on this tablet? Is it like the same cheapo crud computers that come with the same crudware bundle that the top end machines have? So it just kills the poor device before it even boots up.
I can just see this being sold in PC World along with a copy of Norton...
> I can just see this being sold in PC World along with a copy of Norton...
More likely McAffee ... that's the bloatware now as Norton's been pretty good since they revamped it in 2009 (I used to use AVG till after reading a positive review of Norton's reimplementation in 2009 I tried it and it was so much better)
@ Mark Allen
"Apple Sense
This is where Apple has one thing right. They *never* let their computer OS run on under powered crud hardware like that."
I think you are conveniently forgetting the original iPad. Mine is fine if you only want to use iPlayer or Spotify. Completely useless these days for web browsing.
There are a slew of 7 and 8 inch Win Tabs coming with exactly the same specs (and about the same price). HP and Toshiba, off the top of my head, have similar offerings.
The hidden gotcha in this new generation is the memory bus of the processor which is only 32 bit and has a paltry 5.3 GB/s throughput (compare to 25.6 GB/s on an Intel Core processor). I looked at several of these recently and opted instead for a last generation tablet just to get a better memory bus. Still crap, but it gets the basics done 'til I can replace my dead laptop.
So is Win8.1 replacing Android on all those crappy underpowered tablets you see around (and in my case inevitably have to tell a relative, "no I can't "fix it", it's a piece of crap, stop buying them!") because Microsoft are so desperate to shift units it's cheaper to pay for Windows than pay the Microsoft tax on Android (I think this was originally a question).
If they didn't include a huge bezel around the display, this device could actually have lots of use when you install Linux. I mean it's easily powerful enough to ssh into your server and the resolution is not bad. 16 gigabytes is plenty of space for an operating system.
The more pressing question is, if it is crap hardware. This usually cannot be judged by the specifications noted there. The quality of the hardware mostly depends on build quality. How well is it designed. How well can it take some beating. The question is, is it made to last.
If the build quality is decent and you install something more sane than Windows 8.1, it might be a rather decent small laptop, much more usable than any Android or iOS device, but also much more portable than a normal size 13" laptop.
"It's $99 at the retail level. You guess how hardy it is."
Hmm, plastic and good design are rather cheap. That's why we do have 2000 Euro laptops which break apart if you look at them, and laptops like the Elitegroup G320 (or something) which, though extremely cheap for that time, could take some serious beating.
Quality is no longer correlated to price.
"The quality of the hardware mostly depends on build quality."
Walmart is hardly the pinnacle of craftsmanship nor quality,,, well... anything.... About all I see this good for is either an expensive clock that can be duct taped to the wall or a lower-mid range digital picture frame, that might be able to shuffle 3 or 4 pictures, before getting bogged down.
i hate windows - but wtf… it's 60 quid.
for 60 quid, you get a tablet with an HD screen 16gb of storage and a free 16gb sdcard.
wtf is your problem ?
If you have more than 60 quid, get something else. If you don't - then surely this is a great 'hudl equivalent' for the great unwashed of the USA.
I really don't get the attitude ??
we don't all earn 100k a year. Walmart knows it's market.
Yeah, I got a Toshiba Win8 tablet as a no-charge replacement from BestBuy when I turned in my borked Kindle a few weeks back. It's just got 1 GB ram and the Atom processor, but works real nice. Not slow at all, unless I try to open too much stuff at once. But when you consider most iOS and Android tablets don't really multi-process at all, it's a pretty sweet little deal probably for $99. I've been using it quite a bit.
Well, this Toshiba one is good, even with the 1GB ram and the Atom processor. "Encore 2" it's called. I'm running MS Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Chrome, MS Note, all kinds of video and audio programs - no problem at all. Haven't tried any games or video editing, but I'm not much of a gamer or movie maker, One thing I'm surprised to find is that it has GPS. It's certainly a lot more useful than my old Kindle or my wife's iPad. At least it has real programs and a desktop. Doesn't seem any slower than an iPad or Kindle for anything I've tried - really it's about as fast as my laptop when it comes to opening programs and web pages and so forth.
I think the point has been missed. MS' problem is that it has lost mind-share in terms of being the only option. They are buying the bottom of the market so that "windows is everywhere." It doesn't really matter that its rubbish, they just need a presence and to be seen to there. Even if no-one buys that particular tablet, being seen in the shops has value for MS. I'd be surprised if there weren't "co-marketing funds" in play.
Its a bit like people who start out buying a cheap old ford car and as they get older and richer they move up the range. They are unlikely to switch to another brand.
Yes, having a Windows presence.
But I think more significantly making their cloud offering more widely present; Win8 as loss leader dumb client into the MS fog - performance with regard to other apps is barely relevant as long as media, the browser and Office365 work peachy.
If you can replace the Win 8 OS with something more suited for the specs, sure, you're right.
But unfortunately, that's a pretty big 'if'. The odds are that Microsoft will insist that the hardware with the "free" Windows is locked down like TiVo ended up -- no unauthorized (un-signed) OS allowed.
for 60 quid, you get a tablet with an HD screen 16gb of storage and a free 16gb sdcard.
wtf is your problem ?
Better cheap tablets are available for the same or less?
Someone above mentioned the Hisense Sero 7. You can get those for $40-$100 from Amazon, depending on who's selling what at the moment, and whether you'll take a used one. They have 4GB or 8GB RAM, and are otherwise better-spec'd than this crapfest.
Yes, the alternatives are generally Android rather than Windows. Many apparently see that as a plus. (It'd be my preference, if I were interested in tablets. And not having Office is a bonus in my book.)
You spent 60 quid. Ok, it's yours to do whatever you wish.
But you also contributed to the growing pile of electronic waste on Earth.
I believe this all will be sorted when you also need to pay reasonable amount to dispose of this junk properly. Then, people will stop the "but it's only 60 quid junk".
Better spend that 60 quid on food, as your body will properly process that into non-polluting waste :)
I was just thinking about the XP laptop massacre, back when Walmart sold a bunch of way under powered laptops (crap cpu and maybe 512 Mb RAM) and there were lawsuits all over the place. Yeah, the people got their product cheap, and they should have got what they payed for, but the plaintiff's had a very sympathetic jury... You'd figure that Walmart would have learned.
>>There have been instances recently where a warranty was voided because the purchaser installed Linux.
Then *removing* Linux before returning it is probably a smart idea.
Stuffing anything onto the media that resembles the original Win thing would probably help....
But if in doubt, saying something along the lines of " Musta gotta virus then, innit?"
...should hopefully cover most warranty avoidance issues.
Even better, "It stopped working!"
Third world hardware for a third world nation.
I wonder if it's build quality is to shitty to bother loading Linux for use as a e-reader. It would suck to bother doing that with it and have it die in a few months of use. That thing could be just a huge waist of time and money.
Er, their home one for starters. (the USofA)
Buy a bottle of JD in one state and carry it unopened in the back of your car into another and you could be charged with a Felony (Interstate Liquor Transportation).
Where even 60yr olds get carded when trying to buy beers(and get refused because you don't have a local driving license)
etc
etc
etc
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