Gigabyte S1082 Windows 8 Slate Review

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Conclusion

Gigabyte S1082 Windows 8 Slate Review Gigabyte, Tablet 1

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As we have seen over the last few years Laptops have been getting smaller and smaller. The big push now it towards a tablet style device. Android and Apple have fairly decent products that work well for a few things however, to compare the S1082 to either one of those devices would be an insult. This device breaks out of the tablet nomenclature as it runs a full operating system; Windows 8 home or Windows 8 pro. Granted the Gigabyte S1082 Windows 8 slate will not be breaking any speed records but it will work as both a tablet and a laptop for light duty work.

As a tablet, the S1082 worked well. I was able to navigate around the Windows 8 OS fairly well. Using the on screen keyboard I found that I don’t have as many spelling errors as I do on my tablet. Mainly from auto-correct (which cracks my wife up) but I also found the onscreen keyboard to be more accurate when typing.

As a laptop the S1082 also worked well however, do not expect to do any gaming except light duty gaming. I tried a few flash games and they ran well. There’s a few other games available from the Microsoft store that also ran well. Using Office applications, although speed was limited by the Celeron processor, worked just fine.
The other test that I performed was as a media PC. I hooked up the Gigabyte S1082 to our television via HDMI and toyed around with that for a bit. It worked well. I was able to watch TV through Hulu, play music through windows media player, etc. The one thing that I couldn’t get the S1082 to do very well was encode media. Again I feel this is limited by the processor.

Overall I feel the Gigabyte S1082 Windows 8 Slate is a very solid device. The keyboard that the device is packaged with I did not like and I feel is cheaply produced, with that said however it will suffice and work just fine. For the usage testing I replaced my ageing laptop with the S1082 and used it for a couple of weeks. It performed as well if not better than an older Core2quad laptop in my daily tasks most of which include Internet browsing, email, and office applications such as Word and Excel. So in this case, yes the Gigabyte S1082 Windows 8 Slate can replace a laptop for light computing work.