Budget 31-40k Convertible for road warri@r ?

W

warri@r

Disciple
Okay now that I have your attention, before you suggest me German/Italian exotics, let me clarify. I was at Croma today to checkout a DSLR when my eyes wandered to the standard fare around, untill it got locked on this smart looking tab from lenovo called Yoga. A 11 inch convertible tab-laptop with a beautiful ( though not very pixel dense) display, 2gb ram, 64 gb internal storage,and an Nvidia Tegra 3 running Windows8 RT. Very well built with an interesting swivel mechanism too and claimed a 12 hour battery life to top it all. I played around with it for a few minutes, and it was quick enough to run excel, word and powerpoint, and browsing the web was a breeze too. I am not a movie buff, and i reckon it played the sample HD content reasonably okay. Couldn't have asked for more from a Netbookish device.

Never ever an apple guy in my life, I had gotten bored of that Samsung Galaxy tab2 and had given it up a couple of months back and had resolved that my next tab would be windows and when it comes it would be a part time laptop replacement, somewhat like my old Toshiba NB310. So there it was, my dream device (for now atleast) and all I had to was to delay the D3200 for a few more months to lay my hands upon the Yoga, for it came at a surprisingly affordable 35k!!

Since it was fast becoming a deal too good to be true, I decided to research a bit around before taking the plunge, and soon enough I found a fatal flaw that is big enough to be a dealbreaker. Windows 8RT doesn't have an outlook app! Such a shocking omission, akin to a car without a suspension .Thank God Microsoft
has stayed away from making automobiles!! :p Further reading showed me a ray of hope though, that upgrading to windows 8.1 would let this machine have an outlook app. Now I am in two minds. I hope some of the better informed people here can tell me if I can have outlook run reliably on an Ideapad Yoga 11. Suggestion for any alternatives within the same price range are also welcome!!

This will be a secondary laptop to be used for Office apps, Net, email, and for watching some videos. I'll travel a bit, so battery life and ruggedness is crucial too. Thanks for reading through a long query. Now waiting for your inputs
 
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Wait for the 8.1 convertibles coming in the next month or two. Yoga 11 may seem like a decent device but you will realize the underwhelming performance of Tegra 3 upon regular usage.

Thing is, the situation with Haswell, Bay Trail and Temash is that ARM no longer makes much sense for Windows. Bay Trail will give you the battery life of Tegra 4 / Snapdragon 800 with better performance and much better compatibility. Even Haswell has excellent battery life for light usage too, and gives you performance several times that of ARM SoCs when you need it. As a result, most players will be going for Bay Trail or Haswell tablets; AMD Temash at the lower end.

The only two going for ARM would be Surface 2 with Tegra 4 and a Nokia tablet with Snapdragon 800. This should solve the poor performance of Tegra 3 and there's little doubt that either of these devices will have superb build quality. And as long as you are certain you don't need any Desktop app / plugin etc, Windows RT 8.1 will still be a viable option. And of course there will be a whole bunch of Windows 8.1 convertibles.

In short, unless you are in a hurry, wait till November and see how things shape up.
 
Sub said:
Wait for the 8.1 convertibles coming in the next month or two. Yoga 11 may seem like a decent device but you will realize the underwhelming performance of Tegra 3 upon regular usage.
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I want 10 inch or larger. 8.1 is way too small if I have to work on an excel sheet. Size and utility wise I found the yoga perfect. I wouldn't require a lot of multitasking muscle since all i am gonna do in this would be to browse, use excel/word/powerpoint and maybe watch videos.
Sub said:
And as long as you are certain you don't need any Desktop app / plugin etc, Windows RT 8.1 will still be a viable option. And of course there will be a whole bunch of Windows 8.1 convertibles..
Click to expand...
Like i said, this would be a travel-light alternative. I'd always have a proper laptop when i'm at office/home. Will all existing Windows 8RT devices get upgraded to RT 8.1 ?The only thing missing in the yoga for me actually is the lack of outlook.
Sub said:
In short, unless you are in a hurry, wait till November and see how things shape up.
Click to expand...
I am certainly not in a hurry and I guess I can wait. But then in these matters, wait for a better device is practically never ending :) And I won't expand my budget beyond 40k.All these freshly minted devices would atleast cost twice as much I suppose.

Thanks for your response, Aravind.
 
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