Before buying this device, I had a lot of questions going through my mind. I needed this mainly for fine replacement of my laptop and also allow me to enjoy some of the consumption capabilities available on the handy ubiquitous device. Productivity stuff (Office, Server administration, etc.) was a nice to have but I had low expectations for a device at this price range to be of practical assistance. And I was also mildly sketchy about buying a full windows powered tablet at first as applying new Operating System to the new architecture i.e. tablets seemed somewhat manifestly absurd to me.
However this ASUS VivoTab Smart has comfortably exceeded my expectations on both the consumption and productivity fronts. I upgraded to 32-bit Windows 8 Pro shortly after purchase. So in addition to getting the benefit of the apps in the Windows store (most of which are fine, although some apps like the Kindle app are inexplicably below par as compared to my physical Kindle device), I can VPN into my servers remotely, install remote server administration tools and manage servers and virtual machines and run a few select windows productivity apps when needed. I had no real expectation that Office performance would be acceptable but Word and PowerPoint work great on this tiny device. The build quality is excellent and the value for what we get (64GB, NFC, 32GB of ASUS cloud storage) is slightly exceptional. I was surprised how many of the new windows tablets were lacking GPS but this Vivotab has it and it also has NFC. I'm still not sure I'll use it, but it really is nice to have the option. Moreover, adapting the standard micro usb 5 pin plug as a charging and data cable is simply the icing on the cake too.
