Windows 8.1 Has Become Surprisingly Good

Here is a sentence I never thought I would type – I am writing my current book on a Windows 8.1 tablet.

Specifically, an ASUS Transformer T100 tablet. It comes with a keyboard dock, so you can connect the tablet to the dock and use it as a netbook. However, it has two major advantages over a normal tablet or a netbook.

-It runs the full version of Windows 8.1, not Windows RT, so it can run standard Windows desktop applications. So you get the full version of Office, and I can run programs like Sigil and Calibre and Jutoh that I use for making ebooks.

-It’s a tablet, so all the guts of the computer are behind the screen. So when you use it as a laptop, the screen gets warm, but the keyboard section stays cool.

That part is huge. I’ve been looking for a laptop that says comfortably cool in the lap for fifteen years, and I’ve never found one. I thought about an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard, but that becomes unwieldy, or a Chromebook, but a Chromebook still gets warm and Google Docs has a hard time with documents over 10,000 words or so. Additionally, neither an iPad nor a Chromebook has all the apps I need – the iPad and the Chromebook don’t have a good way to, say, create EPUB files, or convert a Nook file into a Kindle file. But the Transformer tablet is a full Windows PC, so you can install any compatible application on it, and it stays pleasantly cool during use.

The biggest weakness is the small screen, and I wouldn’t want to edit or do book layout on it. But for typing new material, it is excellent – I simply dial up the Zoom in Word to 180% and I’m good to go.

It is remarkable that something the size of an iPad has the capabilities of a full Windows PC – and is $150 cheaper than an iPad, to boot.

-JM