Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our trusted gaming gear partner is corsair vengeance and our trusted retail partner is NCIX calm so it's time to check out so many sue systems we're going to be starting with a couple of tablets that are very closely related so these are memo pad 302 series tablets both of them and the key difference is okay this one's got LTE okay this one is a Wi-Fi only model this one's got eight hours of battery life this one has 10 hours of battery life and this threw me for a bit of a loop because I wasn't expecting an android-based tablet to have an Intel processor inside it so it's an atom z2560 processor running at 1.6 gigahertz that enables asus to achieve the battery life that they have on this and it's not because of skimping on other components they're both using full 1920 x 1200 resolution displays which I personally love I like having the extra vertical even when I'm using it in a horizontal configuration and with a 10 hour battery life you're now getting all day computing out of it now this is something that ASA spent a lot of time on with this tablet and I personally love it I actually preferred the original transformer the 101 to almost anything that came after it with the exception of the Nexus 7 and the reason for that is because i personally prefer a textured finish on the back so if i could get you to check this out they have brought back the golf ball textured experience to the back now the great thing about a metal backing is it looks fantastic in pictures which is fine and good but at the end of the day you're going to bring the thing home you're going to stain it with your fingerprints it's going to get warm to the touch and what a plastic backing does is it is more comfortable to hold you can easily hold it with one hand and not worry about accidentally dropping the thing I think I'm making people nervous shaking the tablet around like this but awesome love to see the innovation it's also going to be in a number of different colors so this is a black one I think this is the first time we've seen a black back to tablet from a sous at least in my territory so it might not be the first time here but it's going to come in a number of different colors including white black as well as sort of a pinky peachy color I was wrong okay so I'm still happy because it looks like black and I personally love black tablets but apparently it is actually a very dark blue so my bad and I also should have mentioned before that both of the tablets have two gigs of RAM built in which means you're going to be able to get a much more satisfying multitasking experience now my big problem with low-cost tablets in the past has always been that you kind of look at the thing and you go okay I guess it's kind of built okay and you know it's fast enough I could probably use this just for some basic functionality but the problem is that the screen is always terrible just absolutely terrible so this is where the memo pad HD 7 comes in from a sous this is a relatively low-cost tablet and when I saw care so I'll reveal the price later but it uses a low-cost Qualcomm CPU it's got 1 gig of ram it runs Android jellybean 16 gigs onboard memory 16 gigs of web storage it's got the usual expansion so you've got a microSD slot here on the left side it's quite slim I mean not super slim it's kind of about like a nexus 7 up on the top this is neat you've got USB on-the-go support so you can plug in whatever it is you need to do via USB but this is the kicker it has a 1280 by 800 IPS display which means you get that viewing angle and that content consumption enjoyment that you just can't get from a cheap TN panel and all of that is coming in at a price that's below a hundred and fifty dollars from a brand that you can actually trust as opposed to one that you've never heard the name of before you have no idea if you can get warranty support the games pretty much changed now because there's going to be no reason to buy a low-end tablet from anyone other than a sous now the first time we saw this concept was at CES with the transformer AIO which was a windows-based all-in-one but when you disconnected the display it turned into an android-based 18 and a half inch tablet now we're seeing what I personally find to be a more refined version of that concept in a very very usable form factor so check this out this is the transformer book trio which asus is calling the world first three in one notebook tablet and desktop PC so you can use it three different ways right here they've got it demoed attached to a keyboard so it is a multi-touch windows notebook out running an intel core i7 up to a core i7 4th generation haswell processor you can have up to a one terabyte hybrid drive inside so that gives you that performance that you need from an SSD but with that mass storage that you like from a hard drive okay then okay usage case number two you detach it from the base and all of a sudden you've got yourself an Android tablet now this is running an intel atom processor you can have up to 64 gigs of flash-based storage on it and you can see right here if I pull out my my usual phone thickness comparison we can't get these things out of the case but that's okay we can make do with what we have it is a very reasonable size tablet in spite of having all that extra connectivity that goes into making it compatible with the base station now let's move on to use case number three you can actually use it stand alone without the dock without the Android operating system as a windows-based PC so we've got an asus monitor here this is from their MX series this is the MX 2798 we've actually check this out this features they're bangin Olufsen speaker technology so this gives you the ability to use it as a dock without basically plugging anything into it at all so there's a single cable running between the base station here and the asus monitor although of course if you wanted to use a mouse or something like that you'd have to hook that up separately so very very cool product giving you the flexibility to use either windows or android operating system and anything from a notebook to a tablet to a sitting at a desk type of usage scenario by now you're probably pretty familiar with asus zenbook line of ultrabooks but this one is a little bit new now I wine and gripe and complain incessantly about metal finishes on the backs of tablets on the tops of notebooks because the problem with them is that they always get all stained and fingerprinting and ugly check this out right here this has the same kind of circular design hopefully you can get a couple different angles there and you can check it out as we've seen on some previous asu's products such as the tf700 but the key difference here is that asus has Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on not only the touch surface of the notebook but also on the back of it so what they're calling it as as their tagline is clearly brilliant the notebook that never loses its shine so it will look like that from the day you get it to the day you no longer need it anymore for whatever reason and all you'll have to do to keep it clean and looking beautiful is give it a wipe down so we can't get it out of the case unfortunately but just for the sake of size comparison if we can get kind of a look at it it's a pretty familiar form factor from what we've seen for me Susan there's n book line it also features Intel's new fourth generation haswell core i7 processor meaning you're going to get better battery life better performance and with Gorilla Glass 3 better durability so it's much more scratch resistant than Gorilla Glass 2 in fact there have been complaints out there that old gorilla glass 3 doesn't improve much over gorilla glass 2 from guys that are more interested in phones because it can tend to be a little bit more breakable but it is much more scratch resistant which personally I don't drop my notebook that often so I'm more worried about it getting scuffed up and dinged up when I'm putting it in and out of a bag very cool stuff now right now behind us there has to be the most obnoxious stage display that I've ever seen before in my life but fortunately this product isn't so much about the audio experience and is more about the visual experience this is the PQ 321 asus has already teased this so there's a little bit of information that's been available already but it is a 4k display that means it runs at four times HD 3840 x 2160 so effectively this is for 1080p displays stretched out now there are some technical complications with 4k that do make it inherently more expensive in addition to just be increased pixel density because this is only a thirty one and a half inch display compared to I mean obviously it's a lot easier to put you know in a 24 inch display only 1920 x 1080 pixels so there's that there's the increased amount of image processing that needs to go on and remember if you're going to market a display for consumers and intend for people to watch movies and play games on it it's going to have to have fast enough pixel response time meaning faster processing in order to make sure that you don't get any motion blur or ghosting or input leg that's going to take away from the experience one of the other challenges is inputs it supports a dual hdmi input which means you're actually using two hdmi ports in tandem but there are some technological limitations there the display interfaces haven't really all caught up so the alternative is to use display port which means you're going to be able to run at the full 60 Hertz refresh rate of this display without any sort of funky monkey business it's using a sharp exile panel which means that if you've ever seen one of those you should have some idea what to expect in terms of viewing angles as well as color reproduction but we might as well play around with it a little bit here so we can show you guys it does have pivot it has height adjust so yeah whatever it's it's sort of secured so I'm sure they won't mind if we move things around tomorrow okay I see it as I'd adjust but apparently I can't move it right now for whatever reason you can actually see all the display inputs here on the side if you want to check it out so a sous generally recommends using DisplayPort in not the dual hdmi input there's also an audio in and audio I'll pass through check out all that cooling on the back of the display as well as well that should give you some idea what I was talking about before with the increased I'll hit the increased processing that's going on here I don't think we're going to get pivot out of this one so it is a bit on the heavy side because that tends to happen when you get these large format displays and personally I'm incredibly excited about more than anything else the gaming experience that this is going to enable on the desktop PC there was a thread on the linus tech tips forum not that long ago about how no games support 4k yeah no console games pretty much any pc game going back to like you know quake free you can manually key in a 4k resolution you can on that at extremely high res ultra high-def 4k so thank you for checking out our coverage of the Asus monitors and notebooks and tablets don't miss any of our show coverage from computex 2013 and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips