5 ms·

It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual section

by Bockit 14y ago

It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual sections, maybe a storage, space, benchmarks, screen, software kind of thing, we have a guy who has specific use cases for it talking about how he used it for those cases, what worked and what didn't. And then comparing it to how he normally does those kinds of activities. Even though I don't have the same use cases as him, I feel like I got more out of it this way.

jmspring 14y ago
I think the better summary is -- "great to hear a device review from outside the echo chamber". I'd like to see other non-tech specific reviews of Surface Pro (and similar hardware). All too often, we focus on what is most relevant to our own particular use cases. Looking at possible Win8 laptops, I'm wanting something comparable to my MBA -- decent SSD storage and ram for development (8gig) -- a few options there, but the options crater when you add the third requirement -- touch. But I realize, I am not the normal use case and can't judge any particular hardware beyond what my own personal uses may be.
- seanx 14y ago
  Sony Duo 11. I have one as my primary dev machine and it works pretty well + I can play Civ 5 on the plane.
  - phaus 14y ago
    Is there anything that you are less than satisfied with about it? I was close to getting one, but when I heard the stylus was the S-Trig (significantly inferior to the Wacom for artistic purposes) I just got an iPad 4 to hold me over for a couple of years. It looked really awesome, but 1300 bucks is quite a bit of money for me.
    - scholia 14y ago
      Drawing on an iPad is dreadful....
      - phaus 14y ago
        It sure is, but It was 800 dollars less than a Duo 11. I figured it would have to be good enough until my ideal device is released. I mostly use it for reading programming books, so I still get a lot of use out of it.
      - mahyarm 14y ago
        Have you tried the Adonit Jot stylus, it's pretty impressive. http://adonit.net/jot/ http://adonit.net/jot/
- dbaupp 14y ago
  I've been looking for a new laptop recently and the Asus UX31A seems to crop up often, and there is a Touch version (I haven't actually used either the touch or non-touch versions so this is a bit of a pointless comment).
  - FaddiCat 14y ago
    I have a UX31E. The trackpad was atrocious when I first got it, but they rolled out some driver updates and now it's really good. The keyboard is sub-par but doesn't bother me too much, and the newer Zenbooks have much better keyboards. Other than that, everything is awesome. In hindsight I would have waited for the UX31As with the better keyboards but still, I'm not disappointed. It's probably one of the best computers I've ever owned.
    - glogla 14y ago
      Let's not forget that matte FullHD IPS screen, when we're talking about UX31A.
jim_h 14y ago
I also enjoyed the review. A lot of reviews on devices with a stylus, especially wacom enabled devices, never really go into any detail about the feature. It's generally glossed over with short paragraph about how it works fine and their test was just to scribble a few words. Most of the reviewers never seem to consider the idea that using a stylus would be a remotely useful feature and never put any thought using examining it. As a result, the review is mostly useless for someone who does want to use the feature.
asafira 14y ago
I'm going to admit that I haven't had the chance to read the review in its entirety, but I wanted to reply to this comment anyway. I have a similar issue where I feel as if I am not getting a lot out of many of the reviews I read for products online. For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. Many reviews will put up charts and graphs with benchmarks. But what exactly does a score of (for example) 11,204 mean? The answer, to me, is VERY LITTLE. You can compare it to another phone, but if another phone has a score of, say, 10,000, does that mean this phone is \approx 10% better? Is it 10% faster in what I am going to use it for? No, of course not --- you can't measure how good a device is with a single number, nor even if you single out just its graphics capabilities or whatever slightly more specific metric you choose. Otherwise, articles might throw more subjective descriptions in the picture. "The experience was very smooth". Maybe reading it through quickly that sounds all well and good, but how much does that tell you? It's still a very vague term simply because many of these products have so many things going on it's hard to encapsulate them in a review in a useful way. Anyway, in this case, the article pinpoints a very particular task and examines how good the device was at that one task. I think that is already a great sign that you can get a lot more out of this than a much more general review.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  Benchmarks are useful for excluding particularly bad options.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  > For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. It's not that hard, you just need to use it and review that. Problem is, that takes a good couple of hours of seriously trying out the machine for seriously doing some work. The author of this article even took a couple of days, and did some serious Googling and tweaking to smooth out any wrinkles he encountered (which is the use case for anyone who buys the device because they are expensive: if they "just work" that's great, but if there's a work-around or fix, that's still better than if it "just doesn't work"). But for many review sites, it's much faster to just run some benchmarks (or just copy the numbers from somewhere), compare that to some previous models, some current/similar models, and review that. It doesn't take a lot of effort, time or creative thinking.

by Bockit 14y ago

jmspring 14y ago

I think the better summary is -- "great to hear a device review from outside the echo chamber". I'd like to see other non-tech specific reviews of Surface Pro (and similar hardware). All too often, we focus on what is most relevant to our own particular use cases. Looking at possible Win8 laptops, I'm wanting something comparable to my MBA -- decent SSD storage and ram for development (8gig) -- a few options there, but the options crater when you add the third requirement -- touch. But I realize, I am not the normal use case and can't judge any particular hardware beyond what my own personal uses may be.

seanx 14y ago
Sony Duo 11. I have one as my primary dev machine and it works pretty well + I can play Civ 5 on the plane.
- phaus 14y ago
  Is there anything that you are less than satisfied with about it? I was close to getting one, but when I heard the stylus was the S-Trig (significantly inferior to the Wacom for artistic purposes) I just got an iPad 4 to hold me over for a couple of years. It looked really awesome, but 1300 bucks is quite a bit of money for me.
  - scholia 14y ago
    Drawing on an iPad is dreadful....
    - phaus 14y ago
      It sure is, but It was 800 dollars less than a Duo 11. I figured it would have to be good enough until my ideal device is released. I mostly use it for reading programming books, so I still get a lot of use out of it.
    - mahyarm 14y ago
      Have you tried the Adonit Jot stylus, it's pretty impressive. http://adonit.net/jot/ http://adonit.net/jot/
dbaupp 14y ago
I've been looking for a new laptop recently and the Asus UX31A seems to crop up often, and there is a Touch version (I haven't actually used either the touch or non-touch versions so this is a bit of a pointless comment).
- FaddiCat 14y ago
  I have a UX31E. The trackpad was atrocious when I first got it, but they rolled out some driver updates and now it's really good. The keyboard is sub-par but doesn't bother me too much, and the newer Zenbooks have much better keyboards. Other than that, everything is awesome. In hindsight I would have waited for the UX31As with the better keyboards but still, I'm not disappointed. It's probably one of the best computers I've ever owned.
  - glogla 14y ago
    Let's not forget that matte FullHD IPS screen, when we're talking about UX31A.

jim_h 14y ago

I also enjoyed the review. A lot of reviews on devices with a stylus, especially wacom enabled devices, never really go into any detail about the feature. It's generally glossed over with short paragraph about how it works fine and their test was just to scribble a few words. Most of the reviewers never seem to consider the idea that using a stylus would be a remotely useful feature and never put any thought using examining it. As a result, the review is mostly useless for someone who does want to use the feature.

asafira 14y ago

I'm going to admit that I haven't had the chance to read the review in its entirety, but I wanted to reply to this comment anyway. I have a similar issue where I feel as if I am not getting a lot out of many of the reviews I read for products online. For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. Many reviews will put up charts and graphs with benchmarks. But what exactly does a score of (for example) 11,204 mean? The answer, to me, is VERY LITTLE. You can compare it to another phone, but if another phone has a score of, say, 10,000, does that mean this phone is \approx 10% better? Is it 10% faster in what I am going to use it for? No, of course not --- you can't measure how good a device is with a single number, nor even if you single out just its graphics capabilities or whatever slightly more specific metric you choose. Otherwise, articles might throw more subjective descriptions in the picture. "The experience was very smooth". Maybe reading it through quickly that sounds all well and good, but how much does that tell you? It's still a very vague term simply because many of these products have so many things going on it's hard to encapsulate them in a review in a useful way. Anyway, in this case, the article pinpoints a very particular task and examines how good the device was at that one task. I think that is already a great sign that you can get a lot more out of this than a much more general review.

lucian1900 14y ago
Benchmarks are useful for excluding particularly bad options.
tripzilch 14y ago
> For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works. It's not that hard, you just need to use it and review that. Problem is, that takes a good couple of hours of seriously trying out the machine for seriously doing some work. The author of this article even took a couple of days, and did some serious Googling and tweaking to smooth out any wrinkles he encountered (which is the use case for anyone who buys the device because they are expensive: if they "just work" that's great, but if there's a work-around or fix, that's still better than if it "just doesn't work"). But for many review sites, it's much faster to just run some benchmarks (or just copy the numbers from somewhere), compare that to some previous models, some current/similar models, and review that. It doesn't take a lot of effort, time or creative thinking.