Bay Trail

I'm very much looking forward to new Intel Bay Trail based tablets or hybrids that are coming in the next month or so. They are a much-redesigned 'Atom' platform, which means very low power consumption but enough power to do most stuff.

The original Atom CPUs went into netbooks, in 2009 or so. In fact, I'm typing this on one - an MSI Wind U100 clone from the UK, called an Advent 4211. 10.1 inch screen, 1024 * 600; 1.6GHz cpu, pretty decent keyboard. I had an SSD in it for a while, but went back to a standard hard drive. Running Windows XP it's actually fast enough for most stuff.

It falls over with YouTube and other video related tasks - the GPU integrated here is just too slow, or lacking in the optimisations required to do stuff in hardware - meaning the already-weak CPU has to pick up the slack.

Anyway, enough about this laptop. The new Bay Trail systems will have much that this lacks: HDMI (or, mini HDMI, but good enough); an SSD (how fast remains to be seen, and what premium for a reasonable amount of storage - the lowest tier will come with a mere 32Gb, and Windows will take up 20Gb or so of that..). USB 3. Some will have high resolution screens, some 1280 * 800 and some 1366 * 768.

I'm getting one. I just don't know which one will carry the right specs for me, namely:

4Gb RAM (there will be ones with 2Gb; some of the processors will allow a maximum of 2Gb, so I'm limited to the better ones)
64Gb storage or greater (on the good side, most seem to come with micro SD for music and such)
3g connectivity
Not crap quality

From what I've seen so far, I don't know that there is something that will tick *all* my boxes - the Asus T100 has a lower resolution screen, and no 3g; the Dell Venue doesn't have a full dock, but does have 3g (but at what cost?) - more specs are coming next week.

Pretty exciting. For a long time I've known I don't need cutting edge computing power. Pretty much any Core2 Duo CPU is powerful enough - and that includes the Celeron 847 in my Dell Vostro. If I can get that much power in a small tablet form factor, I'll be able to retire my Playbook (good for in bed, bad for web browsing though, really - until I found Origami Browser, which makes things a bit better), a couple of laptops if I get one with a nice resolution screen, and a whole load of power supplies, cables, etc.

Here's hoping something comes along that is able to meet my requirements! These things are going for a really good price, too - I wonder how Microsoft's ARM-based Surface 2 can compete, when it can't run all the stuff a Bay Trail tablet can.