Tweet
Windows 8: despised at launch by gamers, written off by Valve's Gabe Newell as a catastrophe for PC gaming. It was the upgrade nobody wanted, or seemingly needed - a misbegotten attempt to meld tablet and desktop interfaces into one OS. Two years on, things are looking up. Microsoft has finally got its act together and in combination with new Intel silicon, some remarkable mobile products are emerging that show the OS in a more favourable light. Indeed, while it won't be the best choice for everyone, Windows 8.1 is swiftly becoming our favourite tablet operating system - mostly because of the tantalising options it offers for the core gamer.Let's put this into context. The recent release of Portal and Half-Life 2 on Android proved a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, the sheer class of these titles is a world apart from the vast majority of action games on mobile platforms, and even a decade on (in Half-Life 2's case) both titles are still a pleasure to play. On the other hand, we couldn't help but expect better from the ports from a technological perspective - sub-native resolutions and dialled back settings aren't quite what we expected from Nvidia Tegra 4, one of the more powerful mobile chipsets on the market today. In short, we wanted the full PC experience and at that point, Android just couldn't deliver - but an entry-level Windows 8.1 device does.
More specifically, it's the Asus T100 Transformer Book that delivers the goods. It's a machine with a range of attractive attributes: full Windows 8.1 as opposed to the more limited ARM 'RT' version, along with the Bay Trail chipset and its revised Intel quad-core Atom architecture along with a pared back version of the same GPU found in Surface Pro. The T100 is bundled with a remarkably solid keyboard dock - and all for less than £300. Oh, and did we mention that you get Office 2013 too? This is a laptop that's also a pretty decent tablet and crucially, it plays a bunch of classic PC titles very nicely indeed.
Read more…
More...