Argos enters the mini-tablet market with a £100 Windows 8.1 machine

Argos took a beating when it launched its first Android-based Bush MyTablet last year. Happily, this year’s Windows 8.1-based version seems to be one of the better models in a growing market. It’s good value at its current £99.99 price, reduced from £129.99. However, it faces stiff competition from similar products from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Staples and other stores, as well as PC industry stalwarts such as Acer, Asus, HP and Toshiba.

At the start of the year, Windows tablets – Microsoft’s Surface, Dell’s Venue Pro etc – typically cost from £250 to £500 or more. The new wave models run from around £80 to £180, mainly because Intel and Microsoft are desperate to get into the mass market for tablets. Intel has reportedly been selling Atom processors at promotional (loss-making) prices, while Microsoft has made “Windows 8.1 with Bing” available free (as in beer) for smartphones and tablets with screens smaller than 10in.

The free “Windows 8.1 with Bing” package also includes a year’s subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Personal, worth £59.99. This covers one PC or Mac, one tablet, and one smartphone, and includes a terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage plus 60 minutes of Skype world phone calls per month. (For comparison, Google charges $9.99/month for a terabyte, and Dropbox £7.99/month). The whole bundle would cost more than the hardware. Of course, Microsoft expects to make money from the people who keep subscribing after the first year, but it’s still a good deal.

Microsoft also expects to get a return from setting Bing as the search engine in Internet Explorer 11, because not everyone will change the default. It could even pick up some new customers because you need a Microsoft account – an Outlook.com, Live Mail or Hotmail address – to log on to the tablet. Well, you can create a local account without using a Microsoft email address, but then you can’t simply save files to OneDrive by default, or use the online versions of Office programs.

Microsoft’s services are now integrated into the operating system, much like Google’s with Android and Apple’s with iOS. The difference is that Microsoft’s ecosystem covers PCs and servers, tablets, Windows Phone smartphones and Xbox One games consoles, with the aim that every device will be able to run the same apps from the Windows Store.

MyTablet hardware

Most of the new 7in and 8in Windows 8.1 tablets have very similar specifications. Usually they have a quadcore 1.33/1.83GHz Intel Atom Z3735G processor with Intel HD graphics, 1GB of memory and either 16GB or 32GB of eMMC Flash memory storage (eMMC is slower than SSD, but still fast). The multi-touch screen has a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, and there are 2 megapixel cameras front and back, plus one or two tiny loudspeakers. The main connections are a 3.5mm stereo jack, a microSDHC memory card slot, microUSB OTG and HDMI ports, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.

The Bush MyTablet has an 8in screen, 32GB of storage (24GB free), and only one speaker. It measures 215mm x 123mm x 8.6mm and weighs 330g, so it’s tablet-sized. The top edge has an on-off button and a Windows Key button, separated by a volume rocker.

It is well finished and feels reasonably solid in the hand. It doesn’t have a huge bezel, and with its black front and silver back, looks smart rather than cheap. The styling is quite iPad-like. (In fact, it looks a lot like Cube’s Iwork 7in tablet.)

There are, of course, compromises at the price. The IPS screen is bright and has good viewing angles, but the resolution is relatively low, and creative types may want to recalibrate the colour profile. The solitary loudspeaker is on the back, doesn’t go very loud, and sounds tinny, though headphones were fine. The cameras are OK for Skype but you wouldn’t use them for photography, unless you’d lost your smartphone.

Storage space is limited, but I think WIM (Windows Imaging Format) makes it viable. Briefly, WIMBoot runs Windows 8 from a compressed image file, which is slightly slower but takes up much less space. Either way, if you want to carry a lot of photos or movies around, you’ll need to add a microSD card. Fortunately, 32GB and 64GB cards are now affordable.

Perhaps MyTablet’s biggest compromise is battery life, which is half what you’d hope for. Argos quotes “up to 6 hours (depending on usage)” but that must be with the standard screen setting. I had to turn the brightness up, and my usage included Bluetooth and playing YouTube videos. I easily got through a day of casual use, but if you want to do real work on MyTablet – which is certainly possible with a Bluetooth or USB keyboard and Microsoft Office – then you will want to be near a mains plug.

Software and performance

The main appeal of the Bush and similar tablets is that they come with the full Microsoft Windows 8.1, which runs Flash, Java, the desktop version of BBC iPlayer and so on. The Asus Transformer T100TA has already shown that 32-bit Windows 8.1 performs well on a Bay Trail Atom with 2GB of memory, but reducing the memory to 1GB – the most the Z3735G can handle – is pushing it a bit.

I found MyTablet ran Windows Store apps smoothly, and that IE11 was efficient enough to make browsing comfortable. If you’re used to similarly-priced Android tablets – or last year’s £99.99 Android MyTablet – you could well find the Windows version offers a worthwhile increase in performance. It certainly has no problems playing videos. If you’re used to a Windows 8 laptop or desktop PC, you’ll be more aware of its limitations for multi-tasking, loading lots of browser tabs or running big programs in just 1GB.

The Windows Experience Index benchmarks expose another relative weakness: graphics. MyTablet’s scores were 5.9 for the processor, 4.5 for the memory, 3.3 for graphics, 3.7 for desktop graphics, and 7.0 for the Flash drive.

Being a tablet, MyTablet necessitates a shift from using desktop programs to running “modern” (formerly Metro) apps from the Start screen. There are more than 100,000, so most major areas are covered. However, the Windows Store doesn’t offer the vast riches of the Google Android and Apple iPad markets, or the quality. In many cases, this doesn’t matter because you can instantly switch to the desktop, where the program selection runs into the millions. The problem is that desktop Windows programs look very small on a 7in or 8in screen, and it’s quite hard to hit tiny icons and menu items with a fat finger. (We’re still waiting for Microsoft to produce touch-oriented versions of Office apps like the ones it has released for the iPad.)

You may want to resort to a stylus, but these cheap tablets don’t have the high-precision Wacom or N-Trig screens that lift Microsoft Surface tablets and a few other devices to a different level. What I did was switch to a Microsoft Universal keyboard (£79.99 or less) – a stunning bit of kit that also works with Android and Apple devices – and an Arc Touch Bluetooth mouse (£69.99 or less). At Amazon.co.uk discount prices (£102 the pair) this doubles the cost of MyTablet, though if you use multiple tablets and smartphones, it may be better than buying three different keyboards.

Verdict

If you already use Windows and, especially, a Microsoft Office, then 7in and 8in tablets have fallen to the sort of price level where you may not need to think too hard about buying one. Having a tablet that removes almost all the problems of moving files around, changing formats, learning new apps and so on is a tremendous boon. And although the specs are worryingly low, the Bush MyTablet works much better than you might expect. It’s obviously not in the same league as a Surface Pro 3, or whatever, but you can get MyTablet with a Bluetooth keyboard/case and stylus for the price of a Surface Pro keyboard.

However, small, low-resolution screens make desktop programs harder to use. Someone who mainly wants a cheap Windows machine should consider a convertible 2-in-1 laptop such as the Asus Transformer T100TA or Acer Aspire Switch instead. These work better as laptops, while also working as tablets.

Whether it’s better to go for a 7in or 8in model is a trickier question. I tested the 8in MyTablet alongside Tesco’s 7in Connect tablet, which has the same spec but costs £21 less (£79). The smaller Connect – which is a lot like the Linx models from Sainsbury’s and Staples etc – is more portable and has better sound quality. In the end, my defective eyesight was happier with the slightly larger text on MyTablet, and I preferred its styling and finish, so that’s what I bought. Your view may be different.

Star rating: 3.5/5

Pros: great value, especially if you want the Office bundle. It looks, feels and works better than you’d expect from a £100 tablet.

Cons: poor battery life, and limited selection of Windows Store apps. Other constraints – RAM, storage, screen resolution etc – are excusable at the price.