With the release of Windows 8.1 next week will come new tablets with Intel's latest Atom chip code-named Bay Trail. The tablets, with starting prices from $299 to $350, include Dell's Venue 8 Pro, Toshiba's Encore, and Asustek's Transformer Book T100. More models will ship in the coming months.
The tablets are for web browsing and media consumption, much like the iPad, and offer more than eight hours of battery life with screen sizes starting at 8 inches. Accessories like keyboards can turn these devices into laptops, and the tablets will run existing Windows 7 and 8 applications.
The new Windows 8.1 tablets are lighter and thinner than previous Windows 8 tablets that started shipping last year. An alternative to Bay Trail tablets will be Microsoft's Surface 2, whose ARM processor is expected to be comparable or even better on battery life than Bay Trail tablets.
The Bay Trail tablets should not be confused with the more expensive tablets like Surface Pro 2, which are considered PC replacements and run on Intel's fourth-generation Core processors code-named Haswell. Those processors are faster but more power hungry.
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