For those of you who don't know these, they have great pros and great cons!
Pros (for me)
- PRICE!! Only £49 at time if writing from Carphone Warehouse in the UK with no contracts or anything involving further payment. You can even use the stock checker on their website to see if your local branch has one in stock
- Portability - fits in every coat and jacket I have, my suit trouser pockets, and just about my jeans front pocket! Its not really that much bigger than my wife's iPhone 6 plus
- "Full" Windows so can run all of the VMware Management apps\browser plug-ins, as well as VMware University\My Learn Flash courses
- Relatively decent Atom processor - a Quad Core Intel Atom Z3735G
- Bluetooth on-board so you can add a keyboard and mouse wirelessly
- HDMI out (think its mini rather than micro) so you can plug in a monitor
- USB-to-go cable IN THE BOX :) This is so you can plug in USB devices (NOTE as far as I know you cannot use USB devices and charge it at the same time, as the only usb slot is also the charging socket. Maybe a special\hacked cable would allow this?)
- Micro SD card slot to expand storage (I have heard a max of 32GB is supported)
- Office 365 personal 1 year subscription (worth more than the £49 purchase price, especially as I have heard that Office 365 subscription will soon be eligible for unlimited Onedrive storage - and this will apparently not be down graded or cancelled when the 1 year Office Subscription expires)
- Screen protector applied "out of the box"
Cons (for me)
- Only 1GB RAM - a pretty big deal for your average user, but as a seasoned professional used to tuning the RAM of VMs for Enterprises, I think I can work within this limitation
- Only 16GB internal storage - this is another fairly large issue, especially as the C: drive is only 9GB with about 5GB free (the missing 7GB is used by the recovery partition, which can me moved onto a cheap USB drive)
- Screen - Size - I have excellent eyesight and of course a bigger screen would mean less portability, so I can tolerate this. The real world issue is that it is hard to touch the right point on the screen 100% of the time, especially in Desktop mode, but you could of course make things bigger (i.e. raising the DPI) and the Modern UI Apps are much less of a problem due to them being designed for touch screen devices.
- Screen - Quality - I have saved the worst until last! This is probably the biggest thing I have struggled with. The graphics are not pin sharp at all and are actually slightly fuzzy. I have taken the first layer off the screen protector (the one labelled "Step 2, peel off this layer"), and am considering peeling off layer 1 somehow but the graphics aberrations actually look like a different issue that I am going to investigate and report back on
I have discovered the issue with the W7 screen being blurry\fuzzy and will report the fix in the next blog post!
Summary - flawed but worth the money if you can live with the cons.
