Last week Samsung’s ATIV Windows RT tablet went up for preorder in Europe with a pretty ugly price tag and this week it’s Asus’s turn.
Asus has made quite a reputation for itself in the Android tablet space, with high-end Transformer units and the Nexus 7, so we expect nothing less from the company’s Windows lineup.
The specs don’t disappoint, the Asus Vivo Tab RT TF600TG is powered by a Tegra 3 clocked at 1.3GHz, it features 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, all tucked away under a 10.1-inch 1366x768 screen. Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS and an 8-megapixel camera are also on board, along with a microSDHC slot and the usual array of sensors. Best of all, a keyboard dock is available as well, and Windows RT with a proper keyboard sounds like a match made in heaven.
Sadly, the prices aren’t as appealing as the spec. The cheapest version, with no keyboard dock and no 3G is priced at €699. The top spec’d UMTS version with keyboard dock is priced at €929.
Oddly enough, the Windows 8 Asus Vivo Tab RT TF810C, based on Intel’s Atom Z2760, costs almost as much as the RT version. For €799 you can preorder the entry level SKU, sans keyboard dock. The TF810C has a bigger 11.6-inch 1366x768 screen, 1.8GHz dual-core processor and PowerVR SGX545 graphics. The rest of the spec is practically the same, but the Windows 8 version also comes with a stylus. With a keyboard dock, the TF810C costs €929.