ASUS VivoTab RT Review

Viewed within a vacuum, the VivoTab RT is a strong first effort from ASUS as part of the new Windows tablet push. It’s a conservative and mature design that has proven itself in the marketplace. It’s a thin tablet with a clean, modern aesthetic that doesn’t push the boundary much. A high quality IPS display, solid performance, decent camera, a well-designed laptop dock, good battery life that becomes awesome when you include the dock - really, there isn’t too much wrong here. It’s a well-rounded, high quality product. 

Unfortunately, we can’t evaluate products within a vacuum. The existence of Surface clearly puts all third-party manufacturers on their heels. Having had the opportunity to play (however briefly) with Surface at the launch event in June, it’s simply the one of the most impressive hardware specimens I’ve seen from a design standpoint. Sure, part of the buzz around Surface is the hype machine at work, but it’s not every day that the world’s largest software company decides to jump headfirst into making PC hardware, especially not hardware that looks and feels as impressive as Surface does. It’s on the same experience-first mentality and degree of attention to detail that we typically find in Apple products, except with a completely different design ethos. Apple has gotten so good at executing their designs that consumers and media are collectively jaded about what to expect from them (the 7.6mm thickness of the iPhone 5 barely got a second glance from anyone other than 3GS owners), but Surface is stunning because it’s still fresh. It’s not necessarily as well rounded as the VivoTab RT, though we’ll have to wait for the reviews to really get a good read on Microsoft’s first tablet. Just from what we know thus far though, it’s definitely heavier, thicker, and I’d much rather have the ASUS laptop dock than either the Touch Cover or the Type Cover. The additional battery in the dock is really a killer feature here that I hope doesn’t get lost in the Windows RT hype - having a 2 pound touchscreen Windows notebook with 14 hours of battery life is one of the best things about the switch to ARM. But the VivoTab RT won’t turn heads the same way that Surface will. 

Microsoft obviously has a built-in pricing advantage with OS licensing, and can afford to make less on the hardware to push the platform, similar to a console launch. We saw Microsoft play this tactic very successfully with the 360, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see them do something similar and cut into their margins to win on pricing, even if they don't sell at a loss. This puts third party hardware manufacturers at a distinct disadvantage out of the gate with licensing fees for both Windows as well as Office, but ASUS rapidly shifted their pricing targets to beat or at least match (depending on how much you value the laptop dock relative to the Touch Cover) pricing of the equivalent Surface RT, and it seems likely that we’ll see other device companies do the same. 

But overall, what I take away from this is how successful Microsoft has been in bridging the gap and getting mobile devices to come as close to true convergence with the personal computer as we have seen thus far. It’s pretty impressive to see how capable the VivoTab RT is as a PC replacement, certainly more so than any previous tablet platform. It’s certainly a great tablet, but it also doubles as a fantastic $600 ultraportable, merging the best parts of the tablet world with the best parts of the PC world. For now at least, that’s as good as it gets.