Introduction
For all of its ups and
down, Microsoft's
Surface RT was a
statement that
Windows tablets could
be as slim, light and
sexy as the iPad , while
the Surface Pro offered
the full software
support we'd expect
from a Windows
machine in a similar
package.
Of course, with the
Surface Pro being heavier and more expensive
than its RT brother, and offering less battery life,
the ideal tablet would be the full Windows 8 OS
of the Pro with the light specs of the RT,
wouldn't it? That's what Lenovo thought, with
this thin, light, Intel-powered full Windows 8
tablet, the Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 10.
Like the Samsung Ativ Smart PC and the Acer
Iconia W510 , this is based on Intel's new Atom
processors, which offer performance and battery
capabilities along the lines of what you'd expect
from Apple's iPad 4. It's what enables the
Lenovo Miix 10 to run Windows 8, but be only
9.9mm (0.4-inches) thick and weigh just 576g
(1.27lbs). And like those two machines, it comes
with a keyboard, so you can easily turn it into a
thin and light laptop substitute.
Pulling the Lenovo Miix
out of its box for the
first time, the (lack of)
size and weight is
definitely the first thing
you'll notice. It's nearly
half the weight of the
Surface Pro, and
considerably lighter
than the Surface RT, Samsung Ativ Smart PC or
iPad 4.
The Lenovo Miix offers a 10.1-inch screen, which
sits in a glossy all-black front. It's a 16:9 screen,
with a resolution of 1366 x 768, meaning that in
landscape orientation it looks like most computer
monitors, but in portrait orientation it looks
severely tall. But then, the Lenovo branding and
touch-sensitive Windows button along the wider
edges make it clear that it's designed for
landscape use.
The back rounds off in shimmering silver plastic
that is embarrassingly aesthetically similar to
Apple's tablet, save for the speaker strip and lack
of rear camera (and removable stickers -
seriously, tech companies, give this up), but it
looks smart enough.
Along the edges of the
device, you have a
sleep/wake key, volume
controls, a headphone
jack, a microSD card
slot, a charging plug
and a micro HDMI port.
There's also a micro
USB port, but it's
positioned on the
bottom edge as part of
where the Lenovo Miix
connects to its keyboard case, meaning that it's
useless when the tablet is in its provided case.
In terms of build quality, this tablet-laptop hybrid
feels distinctly average. It doesn't creak or shift
under your fingers, but there were a couple of
poorly finished edges that felt sharp under our
fingers. Still, we wouldn't worry about treating it
delicately - it seems hardy enough. That goes
double when you use its keyboard case.
The case for the Lenovo Miix is very plastic and
corporate, which is fine, because it feels solid
and durable along with it. It houses the Miix's
keyboard, which is standard Lenovo fare in looks,
if a little shallower.
The Lenovo Miix slots
in a dock on the
keyboard and is held in
place with clips - to
use it, you open it up
and the tablet is held in
place by a magnet.
This means that the
tablet draws power
from the Lenovo Miix,
rather than containing
extra batteries to power the tablet, like the Acer
Iconia W510 does.
The case is a fine utilitarian design, and we'll
look closer at the keyboard in the Performance
section of this review, but we have a couple of
gripes. First, we're annoyed that there's no
power port in the keyboard, because it'd be great
to use it as a kind of docking station, rather than
always having the charging cable plugged directly
into the tablet.
Our second gripe is that it doesn't hold itself
closed in any way - there's no magnet or even a
physical latch to stop it flapping open. It's a folio
design, so it would be better if it closed properly.
Perhaps more importantly (or less, depending on
your intended use), there's no trackpad. This
means that you'll be doing all of your interaction
through the keyboard or touchscreen (though
there is Bluetooth, if you wanted to connect a
wireless mouse).
With a full price of £449.99 / US$479 (around AU
$765) the Lenovo Miix 10 is well into iPad or
Nexus 10 price territory, undercutting the likes of
the Samsung Ativ Smart PC considerably. That
said, the Surface RT price drop has made it
available for under £300 online, so it's got some
competition.
Specifications
The Lenovo Miix 10 is a tablet that runs full
Windows 8 (not Windows RT ), yet is less than a
centimetre thick. This is thanks to Intel's latest
Atom chips, known as Clover Trail, which are
designed to offer the kind of battery life you
expect from tablets, combined with the power to
run normal Windows programs.
Specifically, the Lenovo Miix uses the Intel Atom
Z2760 processor, which is a 1.8GHz dual-core
chip, though it does feature Hyper-Threading, so
can act as four virtual cores.
Now, when you
consider that some
recent laptops that use
Intel's shiny new
Haswell chips, such as
the MacBook Air, run at
a much lower clock
speed than this while
being dual-core, you
might think that this is
a fairly powerful
machine.
However, the chips used here are much simpler
than full laptop processors, such as those used in
the Surface Pro. This is the exact same CPU used
in the Samsung Ativ Smart PC and Acer Iconia
W510 , meaning that it's roughly equivalent in
processor power to the A6X chips used by Apple
in the iPad 4.
Similarly, the graphics capabilities of this
machine are not in line with Intel's integrated
graphics in its more powerful chips. The Atom
Z2760 offers effectively lower-end smartphone
graphics in the form of the PowerVR SGX545. In
terms of raw power, it's a less capable GPU than
the one in the iPad mini.
This is all backed up with 2GB of RAM, which is
very favourable compared to other tablets - only
other Windows tablets and the likes of the Nexus
10 match it - but it's still only half what we'd
consider to be the minimum we'd expect in a
laptop.
We'll go over what all
these specs produce in
practice in the
Performance section,
but basically
expectations need to be
managed here: as a
Windows machine, this
simply isn't equipped
to be much of an
entertainment centre, or a machine for intensive
apps.
For storage, it's equipped with a 64GB SSD,
which enables it to wake quickly, but isn't very
large for containing Windows 8 as well as your
files - there's less than 30GB of actual free
storage. This is typical for this kind of machine,
and the Lenovo Miix does at least come with a
microSD card slot, so you can add some extra
storage yourself.
The 10-inch multi-touch screen is an IPS panel,
so should work excellently at just about any
angle, with a resolution of 1366 x 768. This again
is normal for this kind of machine, but it lacks
sorely behind the high-res displays in the iPad 4,
Google Nexus 7 or Nexus 10.
As far as battery life goes, it's quoted for 10
hours of use. These figures are usually based on
turning the brightness down and other power-
saving measures, of course, but it's the sort of
time we're looking for from a tablet.
Performance
Benchmarks
Cinebench 11: 0.53
3D Mark: Ice: 3487
Battery Eater 05: 229 minutes
You can't say we didn't warn you that the
Lenovo Miix 10 wasn't powerful. The benchmark
results give us some numbers on that, since a
mid-range chip would give us over 2.0 in the
Cinebench tests, compared to just 0.53 here,
while the graphics are comically low-scoring.
There's only one 3D Mark benchmark out of a
possible three because it couldn't handle the
other two, and for that one benchmark, it scored
only a tenth of what Intel's integrated graphics in
its Core i chips delivers.
But, as we said, that
was to be expected.
This is not a highly
specced machine. The
important thing is how
this affects real-world
use.
For a start, any games
other than the most
basic fare from the
Windows Store are out. Other than that, though,
we didn't have a problem with the graphics.
Unlike the Samsung Ativ Smart PC , all windows
moved around smoothly, the Windows 8 interface
responded quickly, and scrolling and zooming
through web pages was fine.
Where there were responsiveness problems, the
processor seemed to be the culprit, and really is
what holds this machine back in terms of
performance overall. While the Samsung Ativ
Smart PC frequently froze and crashed programs,
things were much better here, with programs
often hanging initially when switched to, but
coming to life reliably after a few seconds.
Similarly, things like the sound effects on alerts
might arrive slightly later than the dialogue
window, but these can all be lived with -
inconveniences rather than major concerns.
But the slowness is also reliable. Unzipping a
folder takes minutes where it should take
seconds, for example. Any kind of pure data
crunching is just going to frustrate you. It also
means that processor-intensive web content
such as Flash media will slow things down
massively.
If you don't really need it for that kind of thing,
it's fast enough, though. It comes on from sleep
pretty much instantaneously, and we wrote this
review in Google Docs on it (it comes with a tile
for Office, but it just takes you to an Office 365
trial) without any significant problems. We did
experience one crash, but it was sorted after a
restart. As a simple document productivity
machine, there's no problem.
Well, there may be a bit
of a problem. The lack
of a trackpad in the
keyboard case means
that some fiddlier
productivity apps will
be a pain. Text
selection is basically
non-existent, for
example, and though the touchscreen is actually
nice and accurate, selecting fiddly buttons is no
fun at all.
That said, the keyboard itself is excellent. It's a
superbly comfortable size, and feels well made.
It's very shallow, which reduces the feedback it
offers compared to something just a little deeper,
but the resistiveness of the keys is perfect. We
found ourselves typing a suspicious number of
double letters, and double spaces especially,
when using the keyboard, but the simple fact is
that we could use it for hours on end and be
totally comfortable.
It's also good that the keyboard gives
prominence to quick keys such as volume and
Charms when they share a key with a Function -
in a tablet, we find the former more useful than
the latter.
However, it's a shame that the keyboard case is
rather inflexible. There's only one position to
stand the tablet in, and it's very upright. On a
desk, that's not so bad, but on a train or any
where else where space is limited, you really
can't see the screen very well at all. The viewing
angles are good, and the screen is nice and clear,
it's just that the angle becomes acute enough to
be awkward.
Speaking of the screen, it's great. It's not super
high-res, no, but it's an IPS panel, so it's bright,
clear and only darkens slightly when you're at an
awkward sideways viewing angle.
The speakers are fairly loud and clear, though the
way they fire away from you isn't totally ideal.
They're not high quality, but are easily good
enough for hearing people talk clearly in videos.
Of course, battery life is
one of the key
advantages of tablets
these days, so we were
hoping the Lenovo Miix
would match up to the
best out there. Or at
least to the best
Windows tablets out
there. Sadly, that's not quite the case.
It managed 3 hours and 49 minutes in our
intensive battery tests, which would be very good
for a laptop, but is well behind what the Samsung
Ativ Smart PC and small Windows 8 tablets
achieved.
While you could certainly get much more life than
that out of it with careful power management,
it's still going to struggle to last you all day.
However, it held its charge reasonably well when
on standby (the Samsung drained alarmingly
when sleeping), so it's a fairly reliable companion
for a working weekend, provided you can charge
it when needed.
Verdict
The jury is still out on
super thin and light
Windows 8 tablet-
laptop hybrids, despite
the efforts of the
Lenovo Miix 10.
Certainly, there will
come a time when
they're perfectly
powerful enough for
most computer use, but
right now the Intel
Atom chips inside this,
the Samsung Ativ
Smart PC and the Acer
Iconia W510 are just
struggling a bit too
much to make them
ideal replacements for
your laptop.
It's a balance with the
interface too, of course. The Lenovo Miix might
be slow, but it runs fairly reliably. But with no
integrated trackpad, will it run your software
usably?
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