An old friend has been telling me for months that the future of personal computing was coming with new Windows tablets using the Bay Trail system-on-chip architecture built with Intel Silvermont cores. Silvermont is the first major Atom revision in years and is designed to be much faster. Bay Trail would lead to $199 8-inch Windows tablets while also fixing the limitations of Intel’s previous Clover Trail. Well Bay Trail units are finally shipping but my techie friend is sorely disappointed with his.
The lure of this platform for Intel is great. Manufacturers could use the same chassis and chipsets for everything except gaming boxes and servers. Eight inch tablets, ChromeBooks, Ultrabooks, 10-inch tablets, and netbooks, all one chassis with up to four gigs of RAM and a 256 gig SSD. One size fits all for home, car, travel, and work.
That’s the dream, but here’s the reality, at least so far. While the first Bay Trail tablets have the important features of SD card, HDMI, USB, and GPS, most of these are hobbled in one way or another.
In the units shipping so far from Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba (my buddy has a Toshiba Encore), if you are charging you can’t use the single USB port for anything else. This means it can only be used as a workstation on battery power. It can only play a DVD movie from battery. This is dumb.
And not just any USB cable will do for charging These tablets will only charge if they sense that the USB data lines are shorted so accessories cannot be connected. Even worse, if it’s charging you can’t use the tablet for anything, so no keeping it plugged-in at your desk or as a kiosk. My friend’s charger that does this has a Windows logo on it so this has to be deliberate hobbling by Microsoft. Way to go!
Accessory companies are reportedly working on a modified hub or Y-cable with a switch and a 1.8k resistor but that is not only a kludge, it could cost them their Windows certification.
And while these devices have “GPS,” it’s not like you think. Most of these tablets are using the Broadcom 4752 GNSS chip and the driver provides only the location, date, and precision information, not the raw satellite information. Worse, it provides information to the Windows Locator Service only and not in the industry standard NMEA serial data stream through a virtual com port required by Windows programs like Microsoft Streets and Trips or Delorme Street Atlas.
A company called Centrafuse makes a program called Localizer to fill this gap but that also adds $15 to the cost. The bigger problem is very few consumers will even know there is a gap… until they are in their cars and lost.
This platform appears to have real potential yet Microsoft — not Intel — has deliberately hobbled it. Why? I’m guessing there’s another version coming for a little more money that will unlock these features, making them more usable.
But not in time for this Christmas.
I’m not really clear on why Microsoft gets the blame for what I’d considered weaknesses in the Intel hardware. Current Atom tablets won’t charge while you’re working on them if you’re using the 10-watt charger, which while the tablet is in use just makes the battery drain slower. My tablet is a ThinkPad Tablet 2, and surely neither Microsoft nor Lenovo have any vested interest in giving consumers a bad power experience. Lenovo’s better charging option is the dock, which costs 20% of the price of the tablet and is far from portable.
And the charging thing you mention – isn’t this just a limitation of a 7 or 8-inch device that doesn’t support a full size USB port? My Surface 2 and TPT2 both charge from separate charge-only ports, leaving the full size USB port available for peripherals.
It seems to me that Intel has a little ways to go with these chipsets. It’s the trade-off for those of us who want a real computer with the full PC experience, but with the size and weight of an iPad. My Atom tablet does anything my desktop PCs will do (Office is about the most resource intensive thing I need), at just over a pound and with 10 hours of battery life. There are some compromises versus a conventional laptop, but at a quarter of the weight, I’ll live with them.
Sorry, I just don’t understand how Microsoft gets the blame for hardware limitations or devices that are too small to support a full size USB port.
Well, I have an Intel based 7 inch tablet (Asus Fonepad) (tablet with phone function built in) and I have no problems using it while it is charging. Of course it’s running android, and an older (I would think) Intel chip, but I think that supports the idea that it is a limitation coming from MS not Intel (though still could be Intel, but I doubt it).
(By the way, I love the device. I’ve had it 5 months. I travel a lot, have big pocketed dockers, also I make few phone calls, so I don’t mind the gigantic size when I do make a phone call (for that matter, I don’t care what people think when they see me use it), but most of the time, I’m able to read books (and carry my electronic library with me) and watch movies and surf the internet whereever I am, especially if I am in a train or a plane. I had to buy it on ebay, but it was only $350. This device is awesome – so far. And the Intel chip seems to work pretty well, like plumbing, or any good system, you forget that its there.)
It may work for tablets, etc., but 4GB is not enough memory for my laptop.
I believe the problem is that tablet makers are forced to use the 32bit version of Windows 8.1 because Connected Standby is not supported in the 64bit version.
As 3.2 gig is the most RAM (without any hacks) that the 32bit version of Windows 8.1 can use, tablet makers will not be shipping any tablets with 4 gig of RAM and have so far chosen to install only 2 gig.
The UEFI BIOS limits the Bay Trail to 32 bit.
That’s really quite sad.. as Windows 8 REQUIRES a PAE processor ( http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/system-requirements )
yet it is limited to 4GB by Microsoft. (Obviously artificially as their 32bit Server editions have no limitation).
Pretty much every Linux Distro can address 64GB in 32bit mode.
Memory isn’t expensive.. but when you can’t expand it, like in a tablet or some notebooks.. not being able to use the full 4GB in 32 bit mode is very crippling.
It sounds like Microsoft is crippling the memory on purpose as well… is it lazyness, greed or their idea of smart marketing?
I don’t think it matters at this point who is at fault – that is data that will be uncovered, and soon enough, either by geeks tearing into early samples or by companies pointing fingers at each other. The important thing is that this is another platform that was released without having been made ready for prime time. For anyone doing serious work, this is Dead On Arrival. 4GB RAM? Not useable while charging? Yeah, there’s a laptop I can use. Hell, I wouldn’t recommend this to my parents.
>Hell, I wouldn’t recommend this to my parents.
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The attitude of “this isn’t good enough for me, but it’s good enough for kids/parents/grandparents” is baffling. Kids and older relatives should get things that have GOOD responsiveness and durability, not below average. Otherwise they’ll actually have a harder time with it than someone who is more technically savvy and knows the “tricks” to deal with it, such as running less software simultaneously, having appropriate tools and knowhow to do upgrades or fix broken parts, etc. This results in loss of interest and/or more support hassles (and more support calls to *you*).
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Kids and older relatives don’t necessarily need top-of-the-line hardware, but they should at least get systems that one would feel comfortable using for a whole day or weekend yourself. “Ideal” for you might be “more than they need,” but “good enough” for them is *not* below “good enough” for you.
I agree wholeheartedly. But I took the intent to mean slightly slower hardware that they won’t mind, but that may be me reading my own position into it. Obviously, he meant deal-breakers involving charging and use that counter-indicated it for all users.
Yeah, I think Lun Esex misinterpreted Ron’s comment. I inferred not that he was happy for his parents to live with crappy stuff, more that they were an example of low-demand users.
On the wider point, some commentators here, including Bob, have speculated that MS may be blanking off features the more easily to add lustre to an imminent whizz-bang MkII version. This has been going on for years. Back in the days of tallow candles and quill pens, I worked for a big-iron computer company whose engineers told me how they would go to a site to perform a £500,000 “upgrade” by flipping a few dip switches or removing a strapping cable. Job done.
My response was to the broader tone of the comment, not the specific details in this context.
[…] You may not want that Windows Bay Trail tablet after all […]
I have the Dell Venue Pro 8. I am able to use it while it is charging using the supplied adapter. I bought it as a tablet. I have no plans to watch a DVD on it – that is what Ultraviolet or iTunes is for. I plan to use it mainly on battery power. If I ever want to hook a keyboard or mouse to it I will use Bluetooth so the minimal USB support is not a problem. I have been very happy with both the capability and speed of this tablet. It does not purport to be a workstation replacement so I don’t see a reason to expect it to be. Those tablets are available (see the Surface Pro 2 or Dell Venue Pro 11) but cost several times what mine does. Their price will come down in the future; but, for now, I think this little Dell is a great tablet.
Mike… so what exactly do you use it for?
You said it can be used while charging using “the supplied adapter”. I think Bob’s point was that you can’t use the usb port while it’s being used for charging. Bob didn’t say you could not use the device itself while charging.
Actually, he did say that.
“Even worse, if it’s charging you can’t use the tablet for anything, so no keeping it plugged-in at your desk or as a kiosk.”
I wasn’t contradicting, merely explaining my interpretation of what Bob meant.
No. Clearly, Bob is under the impression that the tablets can’t be used for anything while charging. He made this claim (in slighly different ways) multiple times.
Yes. He said that. But to someone accustomed to Windows computers, the whole point of “docking” as opposed to the more limited “charging” is to use external devices while charging at the same time. Hence, I glossed over the literal sense in favor of the meaning. For example, if I were to say “I’ll kill myself if there is another post on this topic”, would you assume I meant it literally?
???
He said it multiple times and wasn’t just talking about using external devices. And, at this point, he should have experience with numerous Android and iOS devices (not just Windows).
(It would seem that very few people watch actual DVD’s on an external device making it reasonable, IMO, that he’s talking about movie files not actual DVD’s. )
Anyway, it’s not an instance of “kill myself” because that phrase is typically used hyperbolicly and everybody is familiar with it.
Bob said “I got a shave” and you are insisting he meant “he got a haircut”. That doesn’t make sense.
“… And, at this point, he should have experience with numerous Android and iOS devices..” Every phone that I have used that included multimedia, feature phone or Android, charged through usb while also transferring files through the same port. Other devices, especially computers, may use a special charging/docking port but they also offer simultaneous usb transfer, so I understand what Bob and most other users expect. But you’re right, he did make an incorrect statement, which some people would take literally.
One would think Microsoft, of all companies, would remember the fiasco of the deliberately hobbled PS/2’s that IBM put out in the early 90s that almost killed them even then, and certainly gave the clonemakers the room to survive.
Microsoft and Intel needed to come in guns a-blazing with something infinitely better than Apple, while meeting Samsung’s pricepoint for performance (I wouldn’t see them needing to go as cheap as ASUS). It would be the only way to get any attention at all. By coming in with a product with *more* limitations to it than Apple’s, and not only with no direct alternative (even at cost) for the something better, but threats to punish partners that DO address the flaws, even if those partners’ support is key to gaining any momentum?
Sorry, this is just…wrong. They really are doomed.
Wasn’t Microsoft the impetus for Intel to design the Atom CPU with the inability to address more than 2 GB of memory in order to limit the competition of cheap “no-name OS” netbooks with pricey Windows powered notebooks?
You’d think this would be obvious by now.
It’s Nathan Bedford Forrest’s old military military creed applied to business: you want to be to market, firstest with the mostest. Of course, when you are first to market you have a monopoly and you have more power to decide what features your buyers get.
Obviously the less firstest you are, the more mostest you’ve got to be: that is most features with the least cost.
Samsung seems to understand this. Late to the smart phone party they were forced to expirment with finding features that over came that so they could get higher margins. It turned out screen size made a difference. With tablets, you’ve got to provide every feature imaginable feature at less price. That’s the cost of being late to the party.
You wrote “Even worse, if it’s charging you can’t use the tablet for anything, so no keeping it plugged-in at your desk or as a kiosk.” All I can say is that is not true for the Baytrail based Dell Venue Pro 8 I’ve been using. Can’t speak to any of the other tablets listed…
Bob did say that, but I interpreted it to mean the same thing he said previously: “if you are charging you can’t use the single USB port for anything else.” It just doesn’t make sense that plugging in a charger would disable the device completely.
Quote: ” Even worse, if it’s charging you can’t use the tablet for anything, so no keeping it plugged-in at your desk or as a kiosk. “
We read different things. Bob says you can’t use it even plugged in at your desk as a kiosk. That is, at least with the Dell Venue Pro 8, incorrect.
I read both phrases and agree with your statement that he said that. I just interpreted it to mean with a functional USB since that would be necessary for full utility when docked. In fact, the USB is rarely used in portable use and most likely only used when docked at home or at the office, so disabling it when charging is just plain stupid.
A lack of ports has really hurt the iPad.
You can get plug in adapters for most of the ports you need for iPad.
I don’t see how it’s really hurt iPad sales at all.
Plus with iCloud, Dropbox, etc. and Airplay Apple TV I find I rarely need a USB port or VGA adapter.
So I don’t understand your comments on iPad.
Chuck, I think Gemini X was being a wee bit sarcastic with his or her iPad comment.
Not to mention the lack of Windows 🙂
For some of us, that’s a huge plus. 🙂
The title says it all! In a rational, non-capitalist world product development would be a process involving requirements analysis followed by engineering to meet them. We should be using technology that already exists to deal with the marketing morons who get in the way. Spades for digging pits to throw them in are readily available and, as far as I know, quicklime to throw in after them is not in short supply. Stupid human beings!
Calm down, dear!
Yea, we got that now: https://www.kickstarter.com
Long ago, when I worked at GM, the problem wasn’t the marketing department. The came up with the specks. It was the cost accounting department which held the balance of power. . GM had a project to compete against the mid 1980s Honda Accord (a fantastic and beautiful car). Marketing had the specks. But accountants like to dumb down the content – if you use a part that is a nickle cheaper the company saves tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars. The marketing department never had the power to drive home the point that by cheapening the product, the cost accountants were driving down revenues faster than costs. The Chevy Corsica and Baretta – which might have been nice cars if they had come out 10 years earlier, but coming out as and when they did, pretty much underscored the problems at GM vis-a-vis the Japanese.
It sounds like MS is continuing to maintain a 64 and 32 bit code base. The question is why? Are they hoping to avoid cannibalizing their high end products?
The irony for me in this is that your average Tablet buyer has not the slightest clue about what is going on.
I’m not entirely sure if this is a good thing or bad. After all tablets are aimed at a (forgive me) largely dumbed-down computing audience. Those who prefer to shy away from a full-blown PC and like to surf on their sofas. No problem with this, by the way.
But these type of limitations are what stop a product becoming a market leader. Stop third-parties making peripherals that work well and perception is, as Bob points out, a kludge.
For Microsoft and Intel the PC was a phenomenal success precisely because people could add to and modify. They could think up some new idea and run with it. People bought that.
To offer something pretty much locked-down may seem clever to the finance guys but they are misreading their audience.
Keep in mind their inspiration for the current tablets was the iPad. That could explain the lock down.
One logic that has so far proved enduring is the idea that tablets are media consumption devices not media authoring devices, which is why the market isn’t really driving the machines to be “do all” devices, where as PCs, including laptops, are more the media authoring device.
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On PCs you want, need and expect high power, key boards,
optical drives, etc.. On a tablet, you are consuming media, so you don’t need a key board, and even the cpu and the software don’t need to be as powerful, except in the consumption of media.
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This is the thing that Microsoft has so far gotten wrong. They keep investing, building and screaming, “look at my device, it can do everything, their’s can’t”, mean while the users say “yeah, yeah, yeah” and go back to using their ipads and cheap tablets to read books, surf the internet, watch movies, play games and figure out where they are on a map.
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A car doesn’t have to be a bus,doesn’t have to be a train, doesn’t have to be a plane, etc… Still, if the price of more power and features continues to collapse, such as the direction that Intel’s new chips had promised, perhaps, it might start having an affect on the market. At some point that might lead to some new killer app and the market changes all over again.
Most Windows tablets you actually CAN use while charging…I think this is a poor design choice by Toshiba, whose products I have avoided for decades. If you want to watch a DVD movie, why use the USB port when you have a microSD slot? Or stream it directly from Netflix?
It would be nice to have ‘real’ GPS, but most mobile devices have opted for a universal access model, utilizing aGPS from the mobile carriers towers and a GLONASS-compatible chip due to the wider availability and greater precision allowed…and not susceptible to the US Military degrading on a whim.
Bob, these are the LOW-END tablets, meant to be cheap in order to compete against the iPad mini and the pantheon of Android tablets available from Fry’s Electronics for $79. They are much more capable out of the box than either Android or iOS, but not quite as capable as a full-fledged i5-based tablet running 64-bit Windows 8 Professional. These aren’t meant to be laptop or desktop replacements, but your ‘third screen’.
I can do 80-90% of what I do on my i7 laptop on my Windows RT tablet (previously an Asus VivoTab RT, just upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 2520 with 4G LTE). The rest I wouldn’t want to do on a smallish screen anyway.
Your right about the small screen and don’t forget the missing keyboard. But I understand Bob’s point. If you can dock the device via USB, a tiny Windows tablet should be capable of being a full blown Windows machine since you would be using an external keyboard, mouse, and display. I’ve been using an Intel Atom based umpc since 2009 just that way. Initially it came with Vista and has been upgraded to Windows 7 and now Windows 8.
This issue is not the specs of the tablet, or whether various features are essential or not. The issue is that the tablet could have much better capabilities, at no extra cost, but has deliberately been hobbled or locked to an MS service. This reveals a certain amount of Evil baked in.
It seems like evil to traditional Windows users. But it could also be considered more Apple like in that while a less powerful device may be capable of doing everything, the user experience gets worse the more you demand of it.
Totally unlike being locked to the Apple iTunes service, yes, I see what you mean…
Bob…Wow! I thought you had stopped blogging…great to catch up on your posts today. Questions: Any updates on NerdTV and the Moon Rover X-Prize thing? Also…I’m still dying to know if your foil hard drive investment will ever see light. Missed your insights! (Just re-subscribed to your RSS through Google NewsStand)
You mean I can’t pack a portable DVD drive and it’s power supply and the DVD itself to watch the movie on an 8″ tablet??? I bet it runs native AutoCAD really slow, too, and doesn’t make allowances for my fat fingers’ lack of precision.
I remain mystified at people mystified that a $200 piece of gear isn’t perfect in every way.
While not hardware problem, my experience with MS and Office 2013 I think is similar and shows MS attitude of late. My company in its wisdom purchased the retail version of Office Home and Business instead of volume licensing. Now if I had the choice I would of not gone that route but those decisions were made farther up the food chain than me. Now to set the scenario, we have at my facility a T1 line. So using the little key card and loading up Office from the Internet is just out of the question. There is an option to make a CD and use it to do your installs but you have to hit a button on the web site to actually get the installation key. Well Wed. that button quit working, Thur. morning I called MS and was directed to an obvious help desk in India. Now I am not here to pick on support from India, no but when I explained the problem the first words out of her mouth was if I can take over your computer for a minute I can help you with that problem, I said no you can’t do that, won’t work besides what are you going to do? I of course knew she was going to start an install from the Internet which when I checked that out would take like 4 hours, and when you have 15 machines to load……
Now finally after a good 15 minutes she realized I needed level 2 support. Next day I picked the MS engineer who was very knowledgeable about the situation and one tech to another he was telling me basically that I was screwed because my company didn’t buy volume licensing. Which I suspected. Now my problem is I know pirating is a real problem, but all over the country now I am sure are techs trying to install Office in places like labs that are not connected to the Internet, small offices in remote places etc. etc. that are dealing with this problem through no fault of their own, but of course MS has the power so we as users of this technology just have to cope. Sure doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy for MS at all.
I fail to see how that situation has anything at all to do Microsoft’s attitude. Your company did what it did. It’s on your company’s IT department for the choice that they made. Why the heck are you putting this on MS?
I thought volume license was meant to be cheaper and that retail was more expensive and full featured. Can retail really be the problem???
DvD argument is kind of tough sell. I haven’t used an optical drive in years, and hope not continue not to.
The Dell and the Toshiba have an SD slot for your movies. A 64gb SD cart can store the equal of 14 DVD’s.
Who uses DVD’s anyway? On a tablet? Huh? Maybe you want a 17 inch laptop to go with that? Why not add a heavy brick, just for fun.
Also, Androids have the same problem and the iPad can’t do this either. And iPads don’t have an SD port.
These tablets also last days on a charge, so you charge them at night once in a while, so this problem won’t ever come up.
(I think Bob wants a netbook, because those babies can do it all.)
I have no idea how one would practically/reasonably play a real DVD on a tablet (yes, you could plug in a DVD-USB player, but that isn’t really practical or reasonable).
I suspect that Bob wasn’t talking about actual DVD’s here: “This means it can only be used as a workstation on battery power. It can only play a DVD movie from battery.”
Clearly, Bob is saying you can’t use the tablets while they are plugged in for charging. If it’s true, that is certainly dumb (my iPhone and Nexus 7 are operational while charging). I suspect that it isn’t always true (that is, some of the bay-trail tablets will work while charging).
When a real Windows computer (now called Pro) is “docked” we normally expect it to expand in functionality to that of a full desktop thanks to the added peripherals. That would include using DVD drives for playing CDs and DVDs or loading software from them. If the single USB port is the only point of access, one would not expect that functionality to be disabled just when you are most likely to use it. Bob is just emphasizing the surprise and frustration experienced Windows users would feel if they bought the Del Venue Pro with that use in mind and found that “docking” is disabled while charging. In another post I included two YouTube videos illustrating the desire of people to use it that way.
So I’ve got the Dell Venue 8 Pro, and it’s a perfectly serviceable tablet. It works just fine while plugged in. The Windows OS on it isn’t ideal, since it was still created for a world of mice and keyboards, but it works nonetheless.
So far the only complaint I’ve had with it, is it won’t install the RSAT tools, which is one of the main reasons I wanted it. Server admin tools in the palm of my hand for the win, would be awesome.
I recently came across two videos 1) relating to the virtues of using the Del Venue 8 Pro as a full desktop and 2) how to work around the simultaneous charging issue so it can charge simultaneously:
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPPY4m8iY0k&list=PLoyspLRKSkwE_lEAPM9UzofxcgUFhe0r3&index=1
2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9q2cUbVBW4
My Asus T100 has a mini USB for charging, and a separate full sized USB port in the keyboard. I don’t have to choose; I can do both (charge and use the USB port) at the same time.
As I writer, I’m thrilled to have a tablet that can run MS Word. The smaller keyboard isn’t the best for writing, but perfect for editing. Now I can make use of the time spent sitting and waiting during my kids sports practices and dance classes.
I have the Dell Venue 11. As I was using today, I allowed the battery to drain. Of course, the tablet stopped working. That’s to be expected. What bothers me is that when I got the low battery warning, I plugged in the power cord and expected to be able to continue working. I used the supplied power cord. After awhile and while I was in the middle of something, the tablet just went black. The tablet was NOT usable. ZIP, NADA, NOTHING.
Dell needs to fix this. I expect to be able to use the tablet while it’s plugged in! If not. what that really means is that the unit can only be used on battery power??? How dumb is that???
On the Dell Venue 11, there is a micro usb for the power cord and a regular USB slot. I don’t know about whether the regular USB slot would work with the power cord plugged in… I haven’t tried that scenario yet.
Never trusted any new windows tablets powered by non-ARM architecture and charge through USB port.
I bought ASUS T100TA . it’s strong and powerful and long battery operating . however, it comes with 10 watt charger and the tablet itself dissipate at max about 11 watts ,this eats whole power from the charger, how this will charge the battery when it’s empty or low !!
I did test my tablet using HW monitor to check the battery when it’s charging , when idle ,it charges very slow and when it in load ,unfortunate , it says it charge but in the software, it drained . I did connect external hard disk and charging the tablet at the same time, nothing more says it drained instead of word “charging”.
So. I concerned in a whole time how to charging this tablet while working on it. for a lot of thinking, I give up and charge it when shut it off and stops all my works on that tablet. how shame is that .
most devices can use it while charging when the system dissipate at most 80% of charging supply. I don’t know why Microsoft design heavy OS on tablet and intel cares about it’s CPU’s TDP without care about the whole system power requirement.
I bought an older tablet (Clover trail) Samsung Ative ,everything same but worse performance and a lot of hangs. But, it has a 40w power supply , So it charges fast and you can use it while charging without any problem even I loose the powerful bay trail CPU but I’m happy to work it for a long time.
[…] Bay Trail article with some of the negatives. https://www.cringely.com/2013/12/13/may-want-windows-bay-trail-tablet/ […]
You seriously nailed this.
I wish I had seen this before plunking for an ACER baytrail.
Every disappointment you mentioned and then a few more.
ACER has just redefined my DO NOT BUY list and INTEL with this extremely
buggy BAYTRAIL SoC crapware is no longer on my No Worries list.
The BAYTRAIL uses more PowerVR technocrap like what we had with POULSBO
catastrophe.
The single USB not charging port is so blindingly stupid it defies description.
I see internally the communications over the SD busses is horrible and they
simply ignored data collision issues.
I would say that Intel has taken the offramp, it may be time to start learning ARM.
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