Since Microsoft began offering the Windows 8.1 with Bing OS to hardware manufacturers for free on all devices that have screen sizes smaller than 9 inches, hardware manufacturers are finally able to offer hardware that performs better than Android tablets at a similar price point thanks to the dismissal of steep licensing costs for Windows.
As you may know, last year I brought Previous Magazine and Split An Atom over from Apple to being companies that run on Microsoft software and hardware as it is the only thing worth using within an enterprise scenario at present in my opinion; Apple has recently gone downhill since the passing of Steve Jobs, and Android is a non-starter for productivity and reliability as we need to spend less time fixing issues and more time achieving our goals. Windows is the only OS I now trust as a daily driver, and we’re bringing our Red Hat servers over to Windows Server 2012 Data Centre Edition.
Recently I’ve been looking for a sweet spot in both specification and price for colleagues replacing their iPads as tablets are hugely useful in terms of form factor but iPads only offer stripped down apps, they need Windows to run the full Office suite, a solid email client, accounting software and to be able to speedily use our project management system whilst out, also an added bonus if the tablet doubles as a media consumption device. Enter Finland’s Eve T1; a solidly specced Windows 8.1 with Bing tablet. The suede black Eve T1 weighs just 395g and is 130mm x 216mm x 9mm, the hardware features an anti-scratch matte finish with aesthetically pleasing metal buttons and capacitive home screen sensor button.
The Eve T1 runs full Windows 8.1, this isn’t Windows RT, this means you can run full Windows applications such as Steam and Adobe Photoshop! Featuring a 64-bit quad-core Intel Bay Trail Z3735F 1.8 GHz CPU, you’ll be able to game rather well and even play Minecraft on the move without resorting to the Pocket Edition of Minecraft, the Eve T1 is a surprisingly powerful tablet. Eve’s T1 really ticked the boxes for me on so many fronts, the T1 also includes a one year Microsoft Office 365 license making it an even better deal for the enterprise user and of course students and home users!
The T1 has 2GB of RAM, if you’ve not bought Windows hardware in a while then this may not sound like a huge amount for Windows, but you will be surprised to know that 8.1 is very usable even with a quarter of that, it just goes to show how Microsoft’s OS has become amazingly streamline in recent years, Windows 8.1 requires a lot less RAM than Android, and thus uses a lot less battery power!
The T1’s 8 inch IPS HD 1280x800px touch screen is very nice for watching Netflix and even reading, plus with a 4000mAh battery offering up to 11 hours of battery life you can be sure you’ll be enjoying the Eve T1 all day. In addition to the stereo speakers the Eve T1 of course features a 3.5mm headphone port. You can get a huge amount of media onto the T1 thanks to the 32GB of on-board storage that is expandable by an additional 64GB via Micro SD, this alone makes the T1 a much more attractive proposition versus the non-expandable iPad that start with just a mere 16GB of storage. Whilst the T1’s 5MP rear camera and 2MP front camera aren’t going to be taking award winning photographs, they are a definite step up on the iPad 2 units we have previously been using.
Utilizing the latest 802.11ac WiFi specification, the T1 is really quite zippy for surfing and kills any buffering with services like Plex, Netflix or BBC iPlayer. Surprisingly there’s a lot of hardware still being released that uses 802.11n, we really recommend that everybody upgrades their home and office LAN to 802.11ac for anything that isn’t a static installation, the performance boost from 802.11ac is well worth having, especially if you back up any laptops or tablets using something like Acronis True Image to a NAS on your LAN. We think a great use for the Eve T1 is going to be an in-car entertainment system as it also includes a GPS sensor, especially as the Eve T1 is solid state it won’t struggle with the harsh environment of a car, especially when combined with 802.11ac for fast transfer of your music library and doing software updates whilst parked outside of your home.
We’re really excited about Eve as bringing business to Europe is a very positive thing, especially when they’ve got such a great product, they successfully compete with the major corporations despite being a startup. Eve is currently running a contest for you to win an Eve T1 on December 8th, the Eve T1 also goes on sale globally on December 8th. For a chance to win your own T1, simply like their Facebook page, and guess the price in a comment on their status regarding the competition.
We’ll be publishing our in-depth review of the Eve T1 soon, stay tuned! It’s a great tablet!
At first I was excited about this, but reading more about it it seems that at least I’m still going to stick tightly with my ipad and android devices, because I couldn’t give this kind of a full windows table to e.g. my mom or son to use, because it’s not safe enough, security wise. Whereas the ipad is good to go and without the need to buy and install any third party antivirus software to slow the system down.
All depends what you’re buying a tablet for; if someone is buying a Windows tablet then they’re choosing it because they want to be productive with real software and not stripped down apps. I can only speak as I find, but as a business we’ve been running Windows 8.1 Pro and the Windows 10 Technical Preview since March without any third party antivirus software running 24/7, we use what ships from Microsoft on that front and we’ve had no issues with viruses whatsoever, and yes people visit a lot of websites and download a lot of files that could pose a threat as we file a lot of DMCA takedowns for music and software we own the rights to with our other business.
I run Avast! across the LAN and remotely via Intune and Teamviewer once per month for good measure on days we assign for updating software and introducing changes to workflows, and we’ve never had any viruses or malware. At this stage Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 Technical Preview are surprisingly rock solid, and this is coming from someone who was a die-hard loyalist who has invested tens of thousands of pounds into Apple over the past decade only to suddenly find that post-Jobs the company isn’t delivering consistently anymore, such a pity considering but now Microsoft is where they should be and we aren’t living in the Vista era anymore. Neither Apple/OS X/iOS nor Android/Google are reliable enough anymore in terms of enterprise use nor security from my usage even though it was something that would have been great if we could have carried on using it as we already had the hardware, software and OS X servers, I would go as far as to say Windows is more secure than Android currently, Android is something we have had issues with over apps on Google Play and other security vulnerabilities, had some particularly nasty Android malware in fact that racked up some big bills through hijacked phones thanks to apps on Google Play; not good enough for business use.
Apple is chasing the consumer market now and that’s fine so long as people know what they’re buying and know which demographic they fall under, iPads and Android tablets do more than any average consumer could ever need and that’s great, but for me personally who replaced MacBook Airs and iPads with Surface Pro line devices, iOS just doesn’t cut it anymore for productivity for business, especially with the harsh white of iOS 8 and Yosemite that are unpleasant for long stints working, it’s become a fashion statement post-Jobs without much thought to UI/UX and how that affects productivity, that and the hardware reliability is atrocious now if you’re running it several hours per day every day with the MacBooks as they’re aimed at consumers now. The biggest joke from Apple for me in the past few weeks has been removing TRIM support for third party SSDs; that makes a Mac Pro that my scoring partner uses in his studio not viable to update any further on Yosemite or suffer very premature SSD failure, and using Apple SSDs isn’t an option because they’re slow, unreliable and overpriced versus third party options from Samsung and OCZ, these aren’t serious machines for business, they’re toys, and UNIX based or not, OS X is in the pan for stability and extensibility.
Kids Corner and Family Safety on Windows 8 and Windows Phone are fantastic for keeping children safe too, iOS and OS X don’t offer anything like that out of the box to my knowledge.
Silly simple things with iOS like opening emailed zip files and various other forms of archive is messy to say the least and the lack of access to the file system is a real irritation as not all businesses can have company data on third party servers for cloud sync and have to use their own VPN secured file servers, and cloud is somewhere else where Apple fell down with Yosemite and security with automatically uploading potentially sensitive documents. Great for consumers, appalling for business, I never in a million years thought we’d all be going back in droves to Microsoft, I thought they were done, but here we are, it’s undeniably solid in my experiences.