Lenovo is launching its first Windows tablet powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
The Miix 630 is a 2-in-1 tablet with a detachable backlit keyboard and pen support, much like the company’s Miix 520 and Miix 510 tablets. But the new model features a Snapdragon 835 processor for long battery life and always-connected 4G LTE support.
Those features don’t come cheap though: the Miix 630 is expected to sell for $800 when it hits the streets in the second quarter of 2018.
That’s not exactly surprising, since the tablet basically has the specs of a high-end smartphone plus a bigger display, a keyboard, and a pressure-sensitive pen. But it still takes a little rethinking of what you expect from a PC when you consider that tablets with Intel’s low-end Celeron and Pentium Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake processors will probably offer similar, if not better performance.
Where Snapdragon-powered systems are expected to excel is in battery life. Lenovo says this model should get up to 20 hours of battery life while playing local videos.
The tablet has a 12.3 inch, 1920 x 1200 pixel display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB to 256GB of UFS storage, and a pen that supports 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. It features a fanless design, and the tablet and keyboard combined weigh about 2.9 pounds and measure 15.6mm (0.6 inches) thick.
There’s an infrared camera for Windows Hello facial recognition and the computer ships with Windows 10 S, but you can upgrade to Windows 10 Pro if you want to trade a little security and speed for the ability to run a wider range of applications.
Asus and HP are also planning to launch their first Windows tablets with Snapdragon 835 chips this year.
Hands-on with the Lenovo Miix 630 Windows 10 tablet with Snapdragon 835
I’m interested in how well these new ARM Windows devices perform. Although, my interest mostly lies in smaller devices that ARM can potentially enable (I’m reading Liliputing after all).