This week I am setting up a Asus Taichi for my boss....

[mclark2112]

First, really cool Ultrabook. We have the 11.6" version, as it appears the 13.3 is not coming to the states...

I am just loading up the software and Office 2013, so I'll leave a couple pics and I'll post my initial thoughts later.

Feel free to ask any questions.

 

[danbbrantley]

Beautiful looking device, hope he has the patience to learn Windows 8. Those that do very rarely seem to regret it, those that don't like to complain.

 

[enthuz]

So is the internal (keyboard facing) screen a touchscreen? What are the specs that your boss went with? I really would like to read your review of this. Thanks.

 

[mclark2112]

Well, I played with it for 2 days and turned it over to my boss. Windows 8 isn't too bad. I initially tried it on laptop a couple months ago, and gave up on it after a week. But with the touchscreen and my love for my Lumia 920, I am starting to dig Win 8 desktop. My boss is kinda psyched to learn it as well.

So, the Taichi. Very nice, polished Ultrabook. My boss got the i7, 4 gigs of RAM, and a 250 gb SSD. The backlit keyboard is perfectly useable. I am not a touch typist, but it felt good. There are 2 USB 3 ports, a mini HDMI and a Mini Display port. The power brick is built into the plug, and the cord must be about 8 feet long. This is definitely a high end device, and it shows.

The screen on the inside is not a touchscreen, a fact that I had to keep remembering when my swipes did nothing. The outside touchscreen is pretty ok, not quite as responsive as, say, an iPad, but not bad either. My only real gripe is with the capacitive windows button, it just had terrible response to touch. The touchscreen also has a digitizer, and the Taichi comes with a powered (AAA battery) pen. The digitizer worked great, and was fun to use. Win 8 is able to cancel out your palm when using the pen, so that was nice.

I played around with annotating PDF files, both with touch and the stylus. It worked reasonably fine, but I think I still prefer my iPad for this. Since it is a 16:9 screen, my standard sized PDF files displayed slightly smaller than they do on the 4:3 ipad. And the apps for this are much more feature rich on the iPad (Goodread, PDF Expert and iAnnotate). The rest of the machine works as you would expect a high end windows machine to work.

I think I may try the Lenovo Helix when it comes out for myself, I like the idea of the detachable tablet more than my boss does. For me the Taichi would never make sense to hold in tablet form, just too heavy. But flat on the desk it was fun to use in tablet mode.

For $1500, I would recommend getting an iPad and a touchscreen Ultrabook. But I already have an iPad, so I'll try the detachable Helix and see how it goes (since work is paying).

 

[enthuz]

Thanks for your review and responses. I am also constantly swiping my screen on my Win8 laptop. I was really hoping that the Taichi had dual touchscreens. I'm sure that updates will address the touch lags as Asus has done with their other products. I hope to test this out for myself soon.

 

[Ridemyscooter86]

now to e completely fair, its the i7 and the 256 GB SSD which bump up the cost to about 400$ more than it should be. I don't think that they sell a lower spec'ed model but the taichi, from what I've played with it seems like a nice computer. To bad ASUS is making a lot of nice products these days because some of them I want, but I will NEVER buy asus again because their support is awful, for me at least, it took them like 2 months to change a motherboard out on my little brothers laptop and that was with their accidental/extended coverage on it. Dell would've sent somebody over to his house to fix it and HP would've taken like 3 days to fix it.