Notion Ink Able 10
Despite the continued decline of PC shipments
the world over, the 2-in-1 segment is chugging along with steady
growth, quarter after quarter. Devices in this segment come in all
shapes and sizes so everyone can choose what works best for them.Today we have a brand new offering from the Indian startup Notion Ink, called the Able 10. This is the successor to the Cain (Review)
tablet - or if you go by theology, which Notion Ink tends to reference
in all its product names, this is Cain's younger brother.
According
to Notion Ink, the Able 10 is the result of a lot of user feedback that
the company received from its previous tablet, and so the main focus
with this one is a better keyboard and more local storage and RAM. Let's
find out if the Able 10 is as good as its Biblical namesake.
Design and build : Most of the Able 10's chassis is
made out of metal for durability, and it feels quite sturdy. However,
the first thing you'll notice as soon as you lift it out of the box is
its weight. At roughly 655 grams, it feels very heavy, and this makes
using it as a tablet with one hand quite a task. The edges feel a little
sharp too, especially the left side which has the cut-outs for the
ports. The labelling for the ports could have been done with a bit of
finesse, as the printing reminds us of some of the cheap plastic devices
we've seen before.The power and volume buttons are placed on the top. On the left, we have
a headphones socket, Micro-HDMI port, USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, Micro-USB
port, 3G SIM slot, and microSD slot. There are stereo speakers on the
right of the tablet, and on the bottom, we have docking mechanism for
the keyboard. There's another 2-megapixel camera and a capacitive
Windows Start key in the front.
Notion Ink has upgraded the keyboard, which is now built out of
aluminium thus making it more sturdy. The tablet latches in place with
the help of magnets and and only detaches with a bit of force, making it
secure. It also feels more like a laptop when the tablet is docked and
is easier to use on your lap or while travelling. The hinge is designed
in such a way that it elevates the keyboard to a comfortable typing
position. Notion Ink has added nice aesthetic touches such as chamfered
edges on the keyboard which match the ones on the tablet.
The trackpad is generously wide and supports multi-touch gestures for
Windows 10. The chiclet keys have decent travel and are surprisingly
not too bad for a bit of typing. We would have liked to see additional
ports on the keyboard dock too, but there aren't any. There's only a
single status LED on the front of the tablet so there's no way of
knowing if it's on or off when it's docked and closed.
Notion Ink
has gone with a 10.1-inch IPS display with a 1280x800-pixel resolution
and support for 10-finger touch input. Vertical and horizontal viewing
angles are pretty good and touch response is fairly accurate too,
despite the noticeable gap between the panel and outer glass. Brightness
is good enough for indoor use but this screen does tend to wash out
under direct sunlight. n the box, you get the tablet, keyboard, a 10W Micro-USB power adapter, a
warranty card and a 20 percent discount card which you can use on any
Notion Ink accessory through PayuMoney.
Specifications and features : The Notion Ink Able 10
uses a passively cooled Intel Atom x5-Z8300 quad-core SoC, which
features four cores running at 1.4GHz and no HyperThreading. The CPU
cores have the ability to turbo up to 1.8GHz when applications demand
it. You also get 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, Wi-Fi b/g/n, and Bluetooth
4.0. The tablet has a non-removable 8100mAh battery. It supports 3G
data, which works well, although we did have to manually enter our
network's APN details to get it working. Voice calling is not supported,
and you'll need to reboot the tablet for Windows to detect a SIM card
if you install one while the tablet is running.
The Able 10 runs Windows 10 Home 64-bit edition with only some basic
apps pre-installed. These include mobile editions of Word, Powerpoint,
Excel, Twitter, and a few games from the Windows store. You don't get a
trial version of any anti-virus program or any other software, which is
good.
Windows
can automatically switch to tablet mode when you undock the Able 10.
This replaces your desktop with a Windows 8-style Start Screen. We
noticed certain glitches at times, for example the on-screen keyboard
would refuse to pop up when we tapped on a text box, thereby forcing us
to launch it manually. The orientation also locked to portrait mode a
couple of times while docking the tablet into the keyboard. These are
minor things but they could get bothersome after a while.
Performance : The use of flash storage helps in speeding up boot times and general
Windows performance is smooth. Heavy websites that use a lot of
high-resolution images or Flash tend to load slower, and scrolling
through them can stutter, even if the Able 10 is plugged in. The tablet
gets a bit warm when you're using CPU intensive apps like Photoshop or
playing a game, but other than this, it runs cool.The Able 10 is
a bit top-heavy, so as long as you have the tablet docked on a flat
surface, you shouldn't worry about it tilting over while using it. We
managed to use it on our laps pretty comfortably for short durations as
the palm-rest area is a bit too small for comfort. The trackpad is far
from perfect. It didn't always register a tap or even a double tap,
forcing us to hit the Enter key. It also tended to mis-read gestures, so
for instance, all opened windows would suddenly be minimised as the
trackpad would mistake a single finger swipe for a three-finger swipe.
This really got annoying after a few hours.
The Notion Ink Able 10 makes for a good media consumption device. The
display is sharp with decent colour reproduction, which means HD movies
look good. The tablet can also play higher resolution video files,
including 4K, with the native video player. Our biggest issue here was
the stereo speakers, which are simply too weak to output good audio. In
fact, the sound is barely audible even when you max out the volume and
with Intel's equaliser enabled. Thankfully, the headphones socket
doesn't have any such issue.The 2-megapixel cameras on the front
and back capture pretty poor quality pictures. Even with good lighting,
images are grainy and often look dull. Due to this, the Able 10 isn't
the most ideal tool for video conferencing.
With most
ultraportable laptops sporting just 32GB of storage, it's nice to have
twice as much for a change. Even with Windows installed, there's still
plenty of room for installing all your must-have Windows applications
along with programs like Photoshop and Microsoft's Office suite. The
microSD card slot can accommodate cards of up to 128GB, which is fine
for storing media files, thus freeing up more disk space for programs.
The Atom chip in the Able 10 offers slightly better performance than the Celeron SoC in the Acer Cloudbook 11.
Cinebench R15 returned a score of 8.6fps in the OpenGL test and 94
points in the multi-threaded CPU test. PCMark 8 returned scores of 1350,
1389 and 1350 for the Home, Creative and Work test suites. The file
system bandwidth was similar to Acer's offering, at 156MB/s sequential
read bandwidth and around 80MB/s for sequential writes. 3DMark Fire
Strike refused to run due to the low GPU specifications, but the Ice
Storm test gave us a score of 8497. To put it in perspective, the
graphics performance is similar to that of a high-end smartphone.
Battery
life is decent for a Windows tablet, and we managed to get 6 hours and
39 minutes in PCMark 8's battery test. Real world usage also yields
similar results, just as long as you stick to non-CPU-intensive tasks.
The 10W charger isn't powerful enough to juice up the tablet quickly, so
topping it up all the way is a long wait. As far as tablets go in
general, battery life could have been better.
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