Asus appears to be planning to launch a new Windows 11 tablet that combines a mix of premium and budget features.
As spotted by TabletMonkeys, the upcoming Asus Vivobook T3300K appears to combine a 13.3 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel OLED display with an Intel Pentium Silver N6000 processor.
So you’ve got a high-quality OLED display, which also has an active digitizer for use with an optional digital pen. But you’ve also got a low-power, 6-watt Intel Jasper Lake processor, so the tablet’s not exactly going to be a speed demon.
Asus hasn’t officially announced the Vivobook T3300K yet, but according to a few different international retail listings, it looks like it’ll be priced like a mid-range laptop, at around $700 and up.
According to TabletMonkeys (and at least partially confirmed by those store web pages), the VivoBook T3300K will likely feature:
- 4GB to 8GB of LPDDR4X memory
- 256GB PCIe 3.0 NVMe solid state storage
- WiFi 6
- Bluetooth 5.2
- 50 Wh battery
- 65W power supply
- 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports
- microSD card reader
- 13MP rear camera
- 5MP front camera
The tablet is expected to weigh around 800 grams (1.8 pounds) and measure 8.2mm (0.3 inches) thick and it’s designed to work with a detachable keyboard as well as an optional pressure-sensitive digital pen, thanks to an active digitizer.
More details will likely be available closer to launch.
Pentile gives 70% resolution vs LCD so this is mainly a video playback device, a use case better served by Android, yet the 800g weight is ill suited to casual use.
PenTile doesn’t take away resolution.
It does the opposite. It increases the resolution by sharing sub-pixels. So while the image may be softer and less colour-accurate, it still leads to an overall increase of image quality.
The higher you move up in resolution, the less the image becomes softer due to PenTile. If you can remember the 2010 Samsung Galaxy S1 (PenTile) versus the 2011 Samsung Galaxy S2, there was a huge difference in said “softness”. And this was true with the S2 (RGB) vs Note1 (PenTile). And it was very noticeable with the Note1/S3 (PenTile) versus the Note 2 (RGB). But became harder to detect comparing the Note 2 (RGB) versus the S4 (PenTile). Then became very hard to detect comparing S4 (PenTile) versus the Note 4 (PenTile) as they moved to 1440p resolution. And Samsung hasn’t gone back to RGB ever since.
Think of it just like upscaling.
Some games in recent years (eg BF1) come with a native upscaler using techniques like checker-boarding. This lets you run on your 4K monitor, a 4K image, from your PC, that is constructed from say 80% original 4K quality (eg 1800p). However, this faux-4K image is still superior to a native-1800p image. And better yet, since all computer monitors cannot scale their pixels properly (unless Letterboxing), this removes that notable image reduction and artifacts. AMD’s Fidelity FX does something similar, but does it better using updated mathematics/guesswork (insert “AI” buzzword). Nvidia’s DLSS (v2) does that even better. Especially on newer titles (eg Metro Exodus).
So imagine running a 1440p image, upscaled using DLSS v2.1, running on an 4K SAMOLED display with PenTile arrangement. It would look pretty darn great. Compared to running the same 1440p image, without any software upscaling, to an identical SAMOLED display with an RGB-1800p resolution. It would look decent, but not great, and you would actually notice the downgrade. Or simply running the 1440p image natively on a 1440p display that’s RGB… again not great, but slightly better than the 1800p stretched image.