Note: I am not being paid to do this review. This review is not sponsored by E-FUN or anyone else. I bought the Nextbook with my own money. This is NOT an advertisement.
Yesterday I came home from a large retail store with a brand new e-fun Nextbook 10 windows 8.1 2 in 1 tablet PC, and a 180 dollar lighter wallet.
This is a tablet that comes with a dock which is a combination netbook style keyboard and touch pad. It is pretty similar to my Asus t100, but it costs a good bit less. There are plenty of pretty low priced windows 8.1 tablets, but to the best of my knowledge, the Nextbook 10 is the only one that is priced under 200 dollars and offers a keyboard dock in the bargain.
I’m totally blind, and severely deaf. I wanted to take such a cheap offering for a spin, and find out just whether a blind person can actually expect to buy something for such a low price and have a usable setup that would enable them to get basic tasks done without costing even 200 bucks.
In the past, some have argued that an Apple Mac machine is the best solution, because one can buy a mac, set it up right out of the box with no sighted assistance, and then use it without paying any more than anybody else. What with the advances in these areas of late, with the free Window-Eyes for Office offering, and the free and open source NVDA screen reader, it should be possible to now buy a PC and use it effectively with no more cost than the PC itself. Since we’re talking about a 180 dollar PC here, this is quite an amazing turnaround to me.
Unboxing this little guy was pretty simple. I used a pocket knife and had it open in no time at all. The inner box which has three different compartments separating the major components slid out, and on top lay the tablet. On one edge I was able to raise a small section of the cardboard to expose the small wall charger. Unlike many tablets this comes with a regular non USB wall charger that connects to the tablet via a rather small round plug not entirely different than those of the old Nokia phones. Under the tablet I found another sheet of cardboard. I lifted this and discovered the keyboard dock.
My impression of the dock started out, and has continued to be, a good one. I personally like the sturdy feel of it. It is unexpectedly heavy for a gadget that basically has no real computer parts to it. I think they made it heavier than necessarily required for its sturdy construction just to help balance against the greater weight of the tablet when sitting in the hinge of the dock and tilted back. The hinge seems to be made out of metal. It has a simple looking set of pins down inside for the bottom connector on the tablet to rest against. Differently than my T100, this tablet connects to the dock and stays fastened using magnets. The T100 uses a button to release small pins that thereby allow you to pull the tablet up out of the hinge on the dock. The Nextbook 10 just requires you to press down on the hinge with one hand while pulling upward with the other hand on the tablet. The first time my mom tried to remove the dock, she dropped the dock and it clattered onto the floor. Luckily though, it remained entirely undamaged. I find the magnetic approach to this to be pretty convenient. It is unexpectedly helpful when placing the dock back onto the dock. You just get the right idea, line the tablet up, lower it into the hinge area with some semblance of the proper angle and it fairly pulls itself together when you’re close to getting it right. Very slick, easy, quick and well, you know what I mean.
The tablet seems to have all its important stuff along the left side, which you’d call the top if using in portrait mode. Starting from the bottom and going up, we have the 8th inch audio jack, that little round power jack for the included charger, micro USB, micro HDMI, two microphones really close together and that about does it for the left edge. Along the back, still on the left side though, we have a micro SD card reader which is positioned pretty nicely in the curve along the back left edge, and just above that and slightly to the right the back facing camera. On the top edge, we have all grouped near the left end, power, volume up, volume down, and the start button. These all take up about four inches and are positioned close to the left end on the very top. I like these buttons. They stick out far enough from the edge of the tablet to make finding them a breeze, and they are all different shapes. Power is about a half inch long, volume is over an inch and you press one end or the other, and the start button is just a small round critter. The response when pressing these buttons is decent in my opinion. There’s no doubt that I clicked the buttons and I don’t get the feeling that they will cave in if I press them a bit too hard. I like the position too, there’s something to be said about being able to just press down on these without having to hold the tablet to keep it from sliding sideways if the tablet is on the dock.
The microphone I mentioned above sounds very good. It is pretty clear and gets really loud. The problem with it is that the computer has unusually bad handling noise, and if you try to use a screen reader while in a call on the computer with someone, they get to hear your speech really obnoxiously loud and distorted if you’re using the internal speakers.
Lastly, we’ve got two back facing speakers, each on the bottom left and right corners (in landscape) of the tablet. I’m pretty disappointed in these. With my hearing difficulty I find these quite hard to deal with. They sound pretty thin, and they are quiet. My Motorola x gets a lot louder, and has a lot better sound. These speakers put me sort of in mind of the sound out of my old Apple iPod touch 4g. I can hear it, but I need a pretty quiet room to actually use the computer without something better, such as an external speaker or headphones.
The keyboard on the dock has all but one of the usual buttons I expect to have. The arrow keys are the common style where the up and down arrows are half as deep from front to back, and so both of those take up the same amount of space as the left or right arrow buttons they are positioned between. Starting from my left on the bottom row I have, control, fn, windows, alt, space, alt, control, left arrow, up and down arrows, and right arrow. So there it is, no context key. I think I should be able to do without a right alt key. I’d probably just re map that using something like Sharp Keys to the context key. I find pressing shift+f10 to open context menus to be a tad difficult.
Across the top, the function row of course has alternative actions that are used if you use the fn key in conjunction with the function key. Nicely, this critter actually leaves the function keys to be function keys by default, something I’m quite pleased about.
f1 sleep, f2 settings app, f3 decrease display brightness, f4 increase display brightness, f5 decrease sound volume, f6 increase sound volume, f7 toggle mute, f8 connect to a secondary screen, f9 turn the touch pad off and on.
I find the f9 key to be a bit less useful for me than I hoped. I always have to turn touch pads off, they’re always dumping me everywhere else when I’m trying to type. I quickly discovered this PC is pretty bad about that with me. Hitting fn+f9 definitely turns off the touch pad, but the problem I have is that when I take the tablet off the dock and then put it back on later, the touch pad is again enabled. I could just press fn+f9 again to turn it right back off, but I ended up disabling the touch pad driver from device manager. That’s easy enough, and if nobody sighted needs to use the touch pad itself, not necessarily such a bad idea especially when the tablet has a touch screen anyway.
The headset jack sounds great through my headphones. The only complaint I have about is that when I plug it in a dialogue comes up warning me about how loud volume like that could damage my hearing. I have to press allow to get the volume to go up. But once I’ve done that, it gets pretty loud. This is similar to how Android handles it, except this tablet requires you to hit allow every time you plug in a headset, not just the first time you turn the volume up loud since you last booted up the device.
Now that we’ve got the physical aspects of this out of the way, let me go through what it is like for a blind person to set one of these up. I don’t believe that it would be possible for me to do this if I were totally deaf, I don’t think I can get braille to work during the setup process. If it is possible to do so with a mac, then that is one way Mac is likely to have an advantage here. Keeping in mind that this is full regular windows 8.1, I expected to get the typical windows 8.1 out of box experience. So I pressed the power button and held it for a couple of seconds. After about two minutes I held down what I guessed must be my windows key on the dock and pressed enter. Shortly there after I had Narrator speaking.
I found that it wasn’t necessarily a good idea to use the tab key to navigate the setup dialogue boxes. It seemed to be skipping a lot of the information when I used the tab key, and the first dialogue I was presented with, the language selection, I was unable to get the next button to work by tabbing to it and pressing space. I don’t remember that being an issue before, but for this one I had to use the narrator commands to navigate. So, holding down caps lock and using my arrow keys, and using caps lock and the space bar to activate items, I followed the setup process, and answered the questions as best I could. I chose basic settings, then signed into my Microsoft account. It offered to import PC settings from either my Asus T100 or my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, I chose my T100’s latest settings sync and away we went. About 7 minutes later I was on the windows desktop with Narrator still running.
I immediately noticed one very interesting thing. I just had a desktop and a Narrator window. Not a single third party app wanting me to sign up for a trial, bugging me about outdated security, no crashes, no long waits for third party applications to unpack, no waits for multiple system reboots while setup was finalized. I was blown away by this. I guess you can afford not to load your machines with bloatware after all, if you can do without when selling people a 180 dollar machine.
Now, I don’t like Narrator too much, a little too sluggish for me yet. So I immediately wanted to try installing NVDA. I just fired up my web browser, which loaded the new tab page right out of the box just as my T100 was set to do last it synced, and headed on over to http://nvaccess.org. Using that same caps lock and the arrow keys I was able to pretty quickly and easily download NVDA to the downloads folder. I then ran the installer and exited Narrator. In a pretty short time I had NVDA installed and running just fine.
From there I downloaded and installed Skype for desktop, since I don’t particularly like the Skype for Windows 8 app (just my own opinion). I had someone send me over Skype the installer for BT sync. I installed that and added a certain folder I’m part of that has lots of useful installers for applications I use a lot. I installed Dropbox and got started on getting windows up to date. First update check I had 67 updates. Those were all downloaded quickly enough, and I was impressed with how fast they installed given the specs of the tablet. After a reboot, I had a couple more updates. By then, I was all up to speed and ready to roll.
The tablet comes with one year of Office 365, 1 terabyte of One Drive space and sixty minutes of Skype credits per month for a year. I figured I could try out the Window-Eyes for Office offering, where you get to use a free copy of Window-Eyes screen reader for free if you have a registered copy of Office installed, but when I activated Office, it extended the Office activation time on another one of my computers instead of setting it up on this one.
So I settled for using NVDA primarily, and installing JAWS 16 and using the demo to see how that worked out. Pretty well, as it turns out. For such a rock bottom price, the screen readers all ran decently well doing all tasks that I tried. I set up a Gmail account for my dad, looked up some tractor information, typed most of this very document, tried out Team Talk 5, talked on Skype, so on and so forth. When browsing the web, it did get sluggish more easily than other computers with better specs would be likely to, but it was usable with a bit more patience.
The battery life is pretty good. I’m not sure what the claim is, but for me it gets about twelve hours. It doesn’t tell how long it will last on the battery meter, so I just remembered the time I unplugged it, and kept track of how long it was until it died out. The battery is no weak point. There are plenty of tablets out there with better battery life, including my Asus T100, but to my way of thinking, the life this critter gets is plenty. The nice thing about it was that when I left the screen on, it wasn’t really all that much worse. That reminds me, my twelve hours is achieved by switching to a projector that doesn’t actually exist. I press windows+p, go up to second screen only and hit that. A dialogue appears asking me if I really want to do that, and I choose yes. There we have it, no screen on at all.
So what is my verdict? Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to expect to be able to walk out of the store with a 180 dollar computer and actually be able to run your screen reading software of choice on it. Having used NVDA primarily so far on mine, I can also lay claim that it is reasonable to expect to be able to use a screen reader that won’t cost you anything, but in the same breath, if you already have a license for other commercial screen readers which offer extra license keys that you could use on a new computer, it seems to be able to run those as well, at least JAWS in any case.
I will be returning mine. This is not because it under performs, this is because I’ve already paid more for another transformer that is the exact same form factor. It isn’t worth this much money for the few advantages the Nextbook offers over my Asus T100. However, if I did not have one already, I most definitely would be delighted to have this machine, make no mistake on that. If you’re going boating and you want to bring a full windows machine along for what ever reason (don’t forget to actually enjoy the boating experience too while you’ve got the chance), if you just want to sit outside a lot, or you want to use a full windows machine and rough it up going out and about and not be worried too much about breaking it and being out all that money, or if you just don’t have lots of spare cash laying around but you really want something like this, then I think I can say that the Nextbook 10 windows version is absolutely brilliant.
To summarize, the Nextbook 10 is surprisingly durable in first appearance. It is heavier than most other transformers, but it is cheaper while providing just about any functionality one would really have need of. While I love typing on this unexpectedly good keyboard, I do miss having a context key, and this issue where my fn key keeps on getting figuratively stuck on is getting in my way quite a bit. The speakers don’t sound so loud, but the microphone is ridiculously clear and sensitive, too much so in fact. The cons though are all things I’d be perfectly happy ignoring if I were going to keep this machine. I miss having a full USB port anywhere on the tablet or the dock. Just one regular USB port would have been awesome! I don’t know why they really bothered putting the Micro USB port on there. You can’t charge it through that (I tried), so all you can do is use an on the go USB cable to give you a regular USB port with which you can connect flash drives and what ever else. Physically, it feels like the tablet is thick enough to have contained a full USB port right on the tablet. The fact that it doesn’t have one there though might be a good thing, because if it did I’d have a really hard time taking it back, my other transformer doesn’t have one on the tablet itself either, just on the dock.
If you’re interested in this machine, search for Nextbook 10.1 Intel Quad Core Two in One Windows. Be careful about that, they have an Android version that is almost exactly the same as the Windows one physically. I got mine at Walmart. At the time of this writing, I can find one on Amazon.com for 210 dollars.
Finally, I am not being paid to do this review. This review is not sponsored by E-FUN or anyone else. I bought the Nextbook with my own money. This is NOT an advertisement.