Acer officially revealed one of the first sub 10-inch Windows 8 devices, the Iconia W3, just before Computex kicked off. It features an 8-inch screen and is powered by a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Clover Trail processor. Now we have just seen a 7-inch Windows 8 tablet design packing an Intel Atom Bay Trail processor. It is called the Inventec Lyon but will not be sold as such as Inventec are a contract manufacturer who will make this or similar devices to be branded by other companies.
The guys over at MobileGeeks went to have a look at this new tablet and made a video of their hands-on time with it.
Inventec Lyon reference design specs:
- 7-inch IPS panel at 1280 x 800 screen resolution with 10-point capacitive multi-touch
- 1.66GHz Intel Bay Trail processor
- 2GB of RAM
- 64/128GB of storage
- Front and rear cameras, parts can be specified by buyers
- Ports: microSD card slot, micro USB, micro HDMI port and a headset jack
- Wi-Fi only, 3G and LTE versions are not planned
- Dimensions are approx 200 x 120 x 11mm, weighing 470g
- Aluminium construction and four colour options
- Windows 8, but it is intended to ship with Windows 8.1
Two Inventec Lyon tablets next to an Apple iPad 3
I noticed during the video that the system had a recorded Windows Experience Index of 2.0 which is pretty low, but as most will know this ‘benchmark’ score is determined by the performance of the weakest part of the system. This system is going to come with Windows 8.1 when it ships in “autumn this year” when this Windows update is launched. MobileGeeks note that the battery life is currently about half of what it should be when the drivers are optimised; it should last 10 hours in that case. It may also be the case of the Windows Experience Index score is currently being hobbled by an unoptimised graphics driver, for instance.
