Alongside the Asus Vivo Tab is its little brother - a lower cost and lesser powered little number which runs the ARM friendly Windows 8 RT operating system, which shares more with traditional tablets such as the iPad than its x86 powered brother.
The Vivo Tab RT packs in an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core chip which has graced its biggest rivals over the last 12 months. Nvidia's Tegra chips have been extremely dominant in tablets over the last year, and have helped power some of the biggest and baddest devices from the Asus Transformer Prime to the HTC One X. While ARM-based chips are new ground for Windows, it's great to see a quick adoption of Tegra.
Our brief hands-on couldn't find any performance issues with the Tegra 3 chip, and Windows 8 remained responsive while multi-tasking apps and switching between them using the gestures.
While the Intel powered Vivo measures in at 11.6 inches, the Vivo RT is a more demure 10.6-inch affair.
The whole tablet is smaller and sheds 150g in weigh over the Vivo Tab, making it substantially more portable. However, despite the smaller size and power, there's still plenty to shout about.
The Vivo RT features the same Super IPS+ panel as the full-factor Vivo, and still packs in a 1366 x 768 resolution, with an inch less to play with. As you might imagine, the visuals are pin sharp and Windows 8 looks fantastic.
Looks, however, have been sacrificed on the design journey from the full factor Vivo to the RT version. The chassis is visibly less refined than its big brother, and this is particularly evident from the plastic keyboard dock. The keys are smaller on the RT version, and noticeably clack and rattle on impact, putting this on a similar comfort level to the Asus Transformer Pad 300.
Despite this, Asus will bundle Microsoft Office 2013 on this lower cost version of the Vivo, despite it being the model least comfortable for long periods of sustained typing.
There's no word on pricing, but we should see the Vivo Tab RT launch with Windows 8 on October 26.
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