Psst! Wanna Buy a Windows Tablet for $199?
If you think Windows tablets are too darn expensive, Toshiba wants a word with you. The company's latest tablets, called Encore 2, run full Windows 8.1 and start at just $199.
For that price, you get an 8-inch tablet with 1,280 x 800 resolution and a quad-core processor. It's powered by a quad-core Atom chip with 1GB of RAM, and there's 32GB of storage, which you can augment with a microSD card. Battery life is rated at up to 10 hours, and Toshiba offers a 10-inch version with almost exactly the same specs for $269.
To hit those price points, Toshiba is preloading the tablets with Windows 8.1 With Bing. The new variant of Windows, which leaked in February, is Microsoft's latest move to enable Windows tablets to go toe-to-toe with cheap Android models — like the 7-inch $110 Excite Go tablet Toshiba also just announced.
To the consumer, Windows 8.1 With Bing isn't much different from Windows 8.1. In a blog post, Microsoft claims Bing will be the default search engine for Internet Explorer on those devices, but that's true of any Windows tablet. The OS is installed by the OEM; consumers won't be able to buy or download Windows 8.1 With Bing directly.More importantly, the tablets include a one-year subscription to Office 365.
The inclusion of Office is important because it was previously the differentiator for Windows RT devices. It appears, now that support for Windows RT has all but disappeared, Microsoft has created a new way to package Office with Windows by offering this new flavor of Windows.
Toshiba's Encore 2 tablets are the first ones to run Windows 8.1 With Bing, but they certainly won't be the last. Look for several more models to appear over the next couple of weeks in the lead up to the big Computex trade show in Taiwan, which begins June 3.
courtesy by mashable
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