



Part of the appeal of Windows 8 and Windows RT is that the OS is equally suited to a touch-driven tablet environment and a keyboard-and-mouse-controlled laptop setup. The Vivo Tab is simply a touchscreen tablet, but its $199.99 dock turns it into a laptop. The dock adds six rows of physical keys, a trackpad, a USB port, and a big battery. It also nearly doubles the weight of the setup — from 1.1 to 2.3 pounds — though it's still pretty light in either scenario. When the tablet's locked into the dock, you'd never even know it comes apart — at least until you hit the slider on the side and pop the slate back out.

Unfortunately, while 10.1 inches is a good size for a tablet screen it's not good for a laptop. The screen's too small to make multitasking really useful, and since Asus had to make the dock the same size as the tablet, it's too small as well. The keys are spaced well enough, but they're tiny — I wound up having to type with three fingers on each hand, which is basically how I type on a touchscreen anyway. The tiny trackpad's an even bigger problem: it's wide enough that scrolling sideways through the Start screen works okay, but there's not nearly enough room for two-finger scrolling in a webpage or pinch-to-zoom gestures.

The dock also had a nasty habit of dropping characters, as if the connection were shoddy between keyboard and tablet. It only happened occasionally (and mostly when I was trying to enter my password to unlock the device), but whole words or lines would get lost before I'd notice my keystrokes weren't registering.

As I found with the Acer W510, 10.1 inches doesn't seem like the right size for a device like this — using the Vivo Tab as a laptop only made me think of crappy, hard-to-use netbooks from three years ago. That's not really the association you'd want. If you keep your expectations in check (and already own a laptop), the dock is a great accessory to a tablet — it's a good stand for watching movies, adds many hours to the Vivo Tab's battery life, and is certainly a better typing solution than poking at the screen. But in terms of Microsoft's great "one device, every use" promise, the Vivo Tab is a swing and a miss.