As mentioned in my Black Friday thread, I recently bought an RCA Cambrio W101 V2 tablet at Walmart for $129 on Thanksgiving.
This post will be my review of the tablet and also a place for questions and answers (please keep it technical, leave any moral/ethical complaints for the other thread).
I bought it as a replacement for my economically dead Insignia Flex tablet, which I was impressed by up until it cracked a digitizer, which was not economical to replace (a chinese seller has a monopoly and would not honor listed prices).
The good:
-X86 tablet with windows, not android (read: can run real programs, not just apps; not a giant smart phone).
-Includes a dockable keyboard with touchpad
-Keyboard is made for windows with the proper keys
-Has a full size USB port (which is advertised as USB 2.0 but actually USB 3.0
)
-Has a decent screen resolution (1280x800)
-32GB of storage on board; reasonably fast
-2GB Ram
-The UEFI menu has a LOT of settings.
The Meh/Weird
-Has a large reset button on the back. Not easily pressed, probably handy (better than the last tablet's paperclip hole reset), but still weird
-Came with a 2A Barrel charger, but also has a micro USB charging port. Odd to have both... (see below)
-UEFI menu is sideways (not a "bad" due to it not being used often)
-Average Intel Bay Trail Atom quad core CPU (normally run at 1.33 GHz)
-RCA does have a driver pack for download. However, it is somewhat limited to the "hard to find" drivers (none of the intel ones provided) and oddly has a "macosx" folder (this ain't no hackintosh!).
-OEM is AVC, if that means anything
The bad/annoying
-The micro USB port is advertised as a "micro USB port", yet is only good for Data. Granted, the full USB port wasn't advertised as being 3.0 either, but as prevalent as micro USB OTG flash drives are, and with a separate charge port provided, I'd think it wouldn't be THAT hard to implement the port as a data port, since many tablets have such already.
-The lid doesn't automatically blank/wake the screen
-The SD slot is finicky and requires manual scanning for new hardware to detect inserted SD cards (Windows 10 glitch?)
-The build quality is kinda crappy... not as good as the Insigina Flex (which had a magnesium frame and glass digizer; this is all plastic). The guts inside are OK though.
-The side button is a windows "start" button, not the usual screen rotation enable/disable button. The latter would have been useful; the former IMHO is a waste of a button.
-The twin 2MP cameras are very noisy, like an early 2000's webcam. I've seen better from entry level bay trail tablets.
Thoughts on Windows 10, as opposed to Windows 8.1 with Bing (what this model originally sold with):
-Windows 10 is much harder and tedious to tame. Apps (many are unnecessary duplicates of old still-existent win32 accessories) require manual deleting of folders to prevent-re-installs (and to actually free up the space), which in turn requires the "take ownership" registry hack.
-Metro apps open in windows, not just fullscreen w/o mods (such as modernmix).
-Start menu is OK, but still inferior to windows 7 (fixed with classic shell)
-10 is more compact on file space, given manual app deletes.
Given the choice (and with modernmix already bought and paid for), I give the win to 8.1; it's quirks were for the most part easily modded away. 10, not so much (although it is usable once modded). I may see if the embedded key works for 8.1 with Bing as these tablets were originally sold with 8.1 (and possibly later upgraded and re-boxed?)... but if 10 is what I'm stuck with, so be it, it's still usable for what I want (a more compact/portable laptop alternative).
This post will be my review of the tablet and also a place for questions and answers (please keep it technical, leave any moral/ethical complaints for the other thread).
I bought it as a replacement for my economically dead Insignia Flex tablet, which I was impressed by up until it cracked a digitizer, which was not economical to replace (a chinese seller has a monopoly and would not honor listed prices).
The good:
-X86 tablet with windows, not android (read: can run real programs, not just apps; not a giant smart phone).
-Includes a dockable keyboard with touchpad
-Keyboard is made for windows with the proper keys
-Has a full size USB port (which is advertised as USB 2.0 but actually USB 3.0
)-Has a decent screen resolution (1280x800)
-32GB of storage on board; reasonably fast
-2GB Ram
-The UEFI menu has a LOT of settings.
The Meh/Weird
-Has a large reset button on the back. Not easily pressed, probably handy (better than the last tablet's paperclip hole reset), but still weird
-Came with a 2A Barrel charger, but also has a micro USB charging port. Odd to have both... (see below)
-UEFI menu is sideways (not a "bad" due to it not being used often)
-Average Intel Bay Trail Atom quad core CPU (normally run at 1.33 GHz)
-RCA does have a driver pack for download. However, it is somewhat limited to the "hard to find" drivers (none of the intel ones provided) and oddly has a "macosx" folder (this ain't no hackintosh!).
-OEM is AVC, if that means anything
The bad/annoying
-The micro USB port is advertised as a "micro USB port", yet is only good for Data. Granted, the full USB port wasn't advertised as being 3.0 either, but as prevalent as micro USB OTG flash drives are, and with a separate charge port provided, I'd think it wouldn't be THAT hard to implement the port as a data port, since many tablets have such already.
-The lid doesn't automatically blank/wake the screen
-The SD slot is finicky and requires manual scanning for new hardware to detect inserted SD cards (Windows 10 glitch?)
-The build quality is kinda crappy... not as good as the Insigina Flex (which had a magnesium frame and glass digizer; this is all plastic). The guts inside are OK though.
-The side button is a windows "start" button, not the usual screen rotation enable/disable button. The latter would have been useful; the former IMHO is a waste of a button.
-The twin 2MP cameras are very noisy, like an early 2000's webcam. I've seen better from entry level bay trail tablets.
Thoughts on Windows 10, as opposed to Windows 8.1 with Bing (what this model originally sold with):
-Windows 10 is much harder and tedious to tame. Apps (many are unnecessary duplicates of old still-existent win32 accessories) require manual deleting of folders to prevent-re-installs (and to actually free up the space), which in turn requires the "take ownership" registry hack.
-Metro apps open in windows, not just fullscreen w/o mods (such as modernmix).
-Start menu is OK, but still inferior to windows 7 (fixed with classic shell)
-10 is more compact on file space, given manual app deletes.
Given the choice (and with modernmix already bought and paid for), I give the win to 8.1; it's quirks were for the most part easily modded away. 10, not so much (although it is usable once modded). I may see if the embedded key works for 8.1 with Bing as these tablets were originally sold with 8.1 (and possibly later upgraded and re-boxed?)... but if 10 is what I'm stuck with, so be it, it's still usable for what I want (a more compact/portable laptop alternative).
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