 Well, it's the big Windows RT, Windows 8 launch day. I have two Windows RT devices. Remember RT, it looks like Windows 8, it behaves a lot like Windows 8, but it is not quite Windows 8 because Windows RT is the first operating system that we've seen from Microsoft ready in every way for ARM processors. The first device we're going to have a look at is the ASUS VivoTab RT. So this is ASUS' take on the whole Windows RT paradigm. We have it in the dark color here, so there's also more of a champagne color available. You can see based on the box, it's apparently quite slim. Once we get it open, we'll obviously be able to validate that. Unlike most tablets, Windows RT actually takes up a significant amount of the storage space that is available on the device. So there's a little warning here that the available user capacity of a 32GB skew will actually be significantly less than that, about half. I think that's a little bit pessimistic, but they're probably planning for the worst case scenario. So this is a full-fledged Windows OS, guys. TF600T is the part number. It comes with a T30 that's a Tegra 3 processor. There won't be a 16GB version available at all because, as you guys can imagine, if it was completely full of VOS and there was no room for apps, that wouldn't be very helpful. All Windows RT devices are shipping with a full Office implementation that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. OneNote being of particular interest because, as a note-taking platform, tablets are obviously less than ideal with what we've seen in the past so far, with the exception being maybe something like a Galaxy Note 10.1 that has that integrated stylus. Okay, so there's the...hold on, hold on, let's get everything out first. There's the device itself. It's very thin. Here's the documentation, the microfiber cloth for cleaning that is included. What else we got here? Warranty card. Warranty card again. It includes a user's guide as well that gives you some basic...oh, actually, this is kind of interesting. So there's some gestures, left edge swipe, right edge swipe, top edge swipe, and finger slides. Let me scroll up and down, let me zoom out, zoom in, tap and hold, double tap. Neat. Explains the charm bar so we can show some of this after. Okay, user's manual. Okay, that's enough for documentation. It includes...what the heck is that? Oh, neat. Okay, so you can adapt ASUS's charging connector right somewhere. Where the heck's the charging connector? Right here to a USB port. That's awesome, actually, especially given the form factor of the device. Because this is a Windows-based device, you will have full access. There's your ASUS charging connector, your ASUS charger. You will have full access to the file system that is operating under your tablet OS, which is not something that we've seen in the past on Android without third-party app support and on iOS at all. So in terms of thinness, I'm going to go ahead...I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do the old iPhone 4 thickness comparison as well as the old iPhone 4 size comparison. So this is a 10-inch tablet. It is extremely light, actually. It's maybe not as...actually, yeah, no, this is extremely light. It's very comparable to something like a Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is, again, a very, very light tablet. Let's see what ASUS has to say for themselves. So Tegra 3 quad-core processor, super IPS plus, ultra-bright, 178-degree viewing angle panel, 8-megapixel rear camera. That's a 2-megapixel front camera right there. Sonic Master Crystal Pure sound reproduction and the battery life at last up to 9 hours. NFC is on board, so you can tap and share without boundaries. We're waiting for it to boot up right now. There's only one actual button built into Windows RT devices, and that is the Windows button right here. On the back, you can see they've gone with a hybrid metal and plastic finish. So the metal part is...actually, here, I should just...what is this? This is an FCC thing. Maybe I'll leave that one on. But this one just covers up the powered by Windows RT etching on the...really? Wow, that's really hard to remove. So there's a brushed metal backing. And then up at the top, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the antennas are hidden under that housing is a plastic backing that actually has a really nice grippiness to it. Okay, that came off. So the powered by Windows RT is not actually etched onto there. It's just the ASUS logo and then that brushed finish. The speakers are built into what I would say is kind of a funny location because this tablet, as you can tell from the way that it's set up, the way that this button is here and the webcam is here, is meant to be used in portrait mode. And the way that I would most naturally use the tablet in portrait mode is holding it like this, which would perfectly exactly cover up both of the speakers. So those are probably going to be a little bit muffled. I would have preferred to see them up here or something like that. But you know, I don't know, if you hold it like this while you're watching a movie or you hold it a little bit higher, you might be able to get away with not covering those up. So here's the setup process. At any rate, you can accept the terms of the EULA after, of course, carefully reading them. Just like any device that you set up that you, of course, carefully read. Here's a few basics. Ah, pick a color scheme. Sweet. Let's go pink. And then PC name will be Vivo. Input is very snappy. Okay. We can pick a wireless access point. You know what? Our wireless, give me a sec guys, because our wireless isn't working correctly here. All right. So we got connected to Wi-Fi. We're just going to use express settings to set up and you, they're going to want you to use a Microsoft account to sign in. Okay. So I'll, I'll, I'll enter this for this next part. I want to show you guys a couple of the different keyboard layouts that are available on Windows RT. So this is sort of your classic tablet layout. They haven't committed any cardinal sins here. They've added smiley faces, which is actually probably more useful than you'd think. I really like the way they've implemented the number pad because as much as it's, you know, you can have a row of numbers up here and it's convenient enough to press an additional button if you're entering more than one number at a time. I love this and being able to reach it with just one hand. They seem to have made pretty good choices for all of the main symbols here. So you got your dash and your underscore available, your asterisk, at sign hashtags, all that good stuff. And then they've also got this layout. This layout, I'm not quite sure what to think about. I think I wish that these bottom parts were smaller to go along with the smaller letters and maybe make the letters a bit bigger. But even with my small hands, I can reach all of them. And I've seen some people complain about this number pad in the middle because it does take away from how much space is available on the screen. But as someone who actually inputs numbers on a regular basis, I don't think I mind it. So let's just go ahead and we'll enter a username and we'll be right back. There's a little guide thing. It says while we're getting your system ready, here's a little guide. So you swipe in from any edge. So swiping in from the right accesses the charms bar, which is your search, your windows key, your settings, or some other handy stuff there. Oh, okay. So it actually wants me to do it. How does it think I'm oriented here? Swipe in from any edge. Come on. Oh, no, it's just timed. Okay. We're getting your PC ready. This will take a few minutes. We'll be back. So here we are booted into Windows 8. It's extremely smooth, which is nice. It looks like everything's animating at a very fast frame rate. It looks like they just do away with animations that might have ended up choppy. So I mean, what we saw, especially on earlier iterations of Android, is stuff like this would just kind of like sort of turn itself around like that. But they've just kind of gone, no, we're just going to kind of back it off and then pop it back up in a way that is oriented more according to how the user wanted it. I want to just show you guys some of the swipe gestures. So on the right, you can see search, share, start, devices, and settings. So a quick setting that I do want to adjust right now is screen brightness. Let's crank that up so you guys can see a little better. I love the way they've implemented things like volume and screen brightness where you just hold it and then dial it into wherever you want. And then see, so with just like one touch, you can almost mute and go all the way to maximum just like that. Oh, classic little Windows tone for doing that kind of stuff. Same thing with brightness. So it'll adjust the slider according to where you are. And then you can adjust it from there, which is just I think it's kind of neat. You can change your keyboard, touch keyboard and handwriting panel. You can change your notification settings, hide for whatever else. Once you're actually inside apps, and I apologize, we actually my phone tethering is broken, my stupid iPhone, but you can access your tab browsing from here. I've seen this approach complained about because it requires an extra keystroke, but I'm actually not convinced that it's that bad of an idea because I don't switch between tabs all that often when I'm on a mobile device. Swiping up from the bottom is also kind of application contextual. So in this case, it brings up the browser bar as well as your internet settings. However, you cannot access all of your internet settings just on the mobile, the modern UI browser. You actually have to use the desktop browser in order to access some of the more advanced settings. So more on that in a moment. Swiping in from the right allows you to manage your multitasking. So let's go back to the start menu. And there's another way to do that. You can use the one button that's here to go back to start menu as well. Once you're on the desktop, yes, it's a Windows desktop. However, Windows RT is not backwards compatible with previous Windows applications that are not designed for ARM. And every app you install on this device does have to come from the Windows, the Microsoft store. So internet options, that's how you would actually change any of those options here. Everything is very smooth though. And the touchscreen is extremely accurate on this particular tablet. So I don't think you'll have any difficulty navigating around and changing your security settings or whatever else that you need to do. From the desktop is where you actually access all of your Office apps as well. These haven't been metroized or modernized. So they look just like the desktop applications. I'd really recommend getting something like the keyboard dock for the Vivo tab if you're going to seriously use Office. But if you're not, then it's still nice to have, it's nice to have all those tools. I personally like the ribbon interface, although not everyone does. But the current iterations are so much better than the original ones back in 2007. You can do pretty much everything, which is just great to have that kind of productivity available on a tablet. I talked about having full access to the file structure of the device. So you can go into my computer and then you can even just go browse your hard drive. All your stuff's just there. It's just in like Windows and browse around and look around like that. Can you zoom? Oh, you can. Although the way the zooming works is sort of gimpy, but we'll just sort of do away with that for now. And pressing this button again gets you back into the modern UI where they've set up a bunch of stuff for you. So there's Kindle apps pre-installed on this one. So there's a Kindle app available. There's a lot of apps that weren't available yet when reviewers had their initial review units, but the store should be open now. And of course we aren't connected to the internet, which will make that demo somewhat difficult. So we'll just go back to the main UI. Now we're tethering to cameraman's phone just to sort of show a little bit of the browser experience. So these aren't super high resolution devices. This is only 1366 by 768. It does still look reasonably sharp, though. It's not as noticeable as I sort of would have expected, but it's not an iPad and it's not a TF 700 display where we're talking super, super high res displays. Zooming and panning around is extremely smooth, very responsive. I don't want you guys to judge the navigation speed based on what we're seeing right here because we are tethered to a phone right now in a room that has just so much interference in it. Let's go ahead and sort of show what the tab based switching is like. So it's really quick to switch between tabs. That personally doesn't bother me at all. If you do want to open a new tab, you just go like this, type in your URL or type in your search. So I don't know ponies. Ponies are great. Everyone likes ponies. It helps if you spell it right though. Ponies and then you just go like that. Does a Bing search by default. So yeah, we can learn about, oh, that's a cute pony. You know what? Let's lose the whole pony thing now. Let's go back to Metro. So let's go to the store. I have Metro, not Metro, modern UI. Let's go back to the store, load up the store and see if things look a little bit more densely populated. So there you go. You got your Netflix, your iHeart radio, Skype. Skype better be available. Skype is actually one that pretty much everyone should install because of the convergence that I think we're going to see with Skype and Windows Live Messenger and all those sort of messaging apps that are available. The one that it still doesn't work with is the integrated messenger. I mean, it doesn't work with Google Talk, but we'll see if that ever happens. So New York Times, more tier one sort of new sites still need to get applications ready. Remote desktop. So that's a cool thing to have available. Oh, another thing to note guys that yes, this is a proper browser. So unlike Android and unlike iOS, full flash is available on Windows. This is Internet Explorer 10. So there's no limitations. You will see flash content and personally, it still matters to me. Flash isn't dead yet. It might be like a dead standard or a dying standard, but I still use it. So it's nice to have. So let's have a look at all the stuff physically around the edge of the tablet. This is your ejection port for the docking keyboard. This is your micro SD slot. Here's a micro HDMI port, which I personally think is pretty darn handy to have on a device like this in case, especially. Yeah, it's one of those things if you ever want to do like a PowerPoint presentation. It actually has PowerPoint, unlike other platforms. So there's a power button. Okay. There's your three and a half inch, three and a half millimeter headphones. Yeah, three and a half inch headphone jack. No big deal. 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. There's your volume rocker. And then on the bottom you find there's your power. And then there's this all of this is part of the docking for the keyboard add on that is available separately, although I would definitely recommend it because as a productivity tablet, Windows RT is a much stronger and more compelling option than what we've seen from Android and iOS in the past. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Vivo tab. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.