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An impressive Windows 8 tablet, and Samsung's crack at another smartwatch
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First-generation products are usually not the most practical buys. We take a look at two second instalments, the latest Windows 8 tablet from HP and the Samsung Gear smartwatch, to find out how far they have evolved since their debut.
HP Omni 10
Most Windows 8 tablets have not disappointed as far as performance is concerned, but they have been short on the wow factor. HP’s latest effort, the Omni 10, addresses that shortcoming.
The first steps in that direction are the tablet’s solid build and its premium finish. Press down hard on the back panel and there is absolutely no sign of any distortion. Up front, when you press down on the display there is no deformation on the screen. This is rare for a tablet.
The rubber cover over the entire back strengthens grip. At 661g, the Omni 10 isn’t the lightest tablet, but you don’t really feel the weight.
While the 10.1-inch screen isn’t in Apple’s retina display (2,048x1,536 pixels) league, it still packs in a 1,920x1,200 pixel resolution, which lives up to a variety of tasks. Among Windows tablets, this has one of the highest screen resolutions.
Windows 8 desktop scaling looks a lot better on this than on an 8-inch screen. The icons are bigger and the text is marginally more comfortable to read, even without zooming in. If you want to use it to watch movies and videos, the colours are adequately rich, even though they tend to lean towards cooler tones.
There is a touch-sensitive Windows key below the display, and that is supposed to wake the device and take you to wherever you left the tablet last—the desktop mode or Windows 8 home screen. There is the occasional glitch—a single touch on the key may not get the desired response.
The Omni 10 packs in an Intel Atom Z3770 Bay Trail quad-core chip, with 2 GB RAM. This is enough power for optimum use. The one bottleneck while multitasking is the virtual ceiling with this amount of RAM. App load can be handled with ease, but once there are more than five open at the same time, new apps load a tad slower. Most people using a tablet, however, are not likely to have five apps open at the same time.
HP pre-loads the Omni 10 with the Microsoft Office Home and Student edition (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote), which costs ₹ 5,499 when purchased separately. Users will also get 25 GB lifetime free cloud storage space from Box.
With extremely low power use (4-watt maximum power consumption), this chip is designed only for passively-cooled Windows hybrids and tablets—in other words, there is no separate fan to cool the hardware. You will get around four and a half hours of continuous video playback, at 70% brightness, and around 8 hours just for productivity tasks, with Wi-Fi connected throughout.
If you are looking for a Windows ultraportable to carry around with you for meetings, this is it. The Omni 10 tablet is priced at ₹ 29,990.
Samsung Gear 2
The smartwatch held much promise in 2013. In 2014, we will possibly see this category evolve. Samsung, on its part, is serious with the Gear 2.
The Gear 2 looks similar to its predecessor. The changes are subtle, and they make the product much more refined. The 2-megapixel camera has been shifted from the strap, to the dust- and water-resistant main watch housing (the face of the watch). With additional release levers on each side, you can switch to straps of other colours. The area around the 1.63-inch screen has a brushed metal finish.
The Gear 2 is compatible with 17 Samsung smartphones at the moment, with the Gear Manager app handling the Bluetooth connection between the phone and the watch. You can change a lot of settings from within the menu on the watch, but the smartphone software offers more detailed options.
The Gear 2 includes apps like the phone dialler, contacts list, and music player among others, and a host of health apps like heart rate, pedometer and sleep monitor. The WatchOn Remote app on the watch itself lets you configure devices like a TV, a set-top box and an air conditioner. A limited number of devices are compatible, but if you have one that works, it’s very convenient.
You may not use the 2-megapixel camera too often but it is useful to capture something as a reminder for a later date. The built-in music player lets you hook up a Bluetooth headset, in case you don’t want to shorten your smartphone’s battery life.
The Gear 2 could be a phone, it could be a camera, or it could be your health assistant. But we recommend it primarily for the vivid display, the growing app ecosystem, and the fact that the potential to do better than the first generation of smartwatches is being realized, slowly but surely. The Gear 2 is priced at ₹ 22,500.
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