Hands-on with Bay Trail: Intel's latest, best hope for tablet relevance

High-performance tablets are about to become very, very cheap, if Intel has any say in the matter. The company took the wraps off its newest system-on-chip (SoC) at the annual Intel Developers Forum (IDF) Tuesday. Code-named Bay Trail, the new processor family will power new Windows and Android on tablets priced as low as $199.

In fact, Intel Mobile and Communications Group General Manager Chris Walker said at an embargoed briefing on Monday that Bay Trail–powered tablets will have prices as low as $199 by the end of 2013, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will have “the flexibility to go lower.”

Intel gave us about 2 hours of hands-on time with two reference-design tablets outfitted with 2.4GHz, quad-core Atom Z3770 processors and 2GB of DDR3L/1067 memory (one running Windows 8.1 and the other Android 4.2.2). The devices had 8-inch screens with a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels. While Intel does not intend to bring these tablets to the consumer retail market, Walker said that they are representative of what Intel’s OEM partners will deliver later this year.

Intel manufactured this reference-design tablet to demonstrate the capabilities of its new Bay Trail series of microprocessors.

It came as no surprise that the Android version was capable of playing simple arcade-style games, such as the side-scroller Jetpack Joyride, but it was a revelation to jump into Valve’s multiplayer first-person shooter Team Fortress 2 on the Windows 8.1 version and experience relatively fluid gameplay on an 8-inch tablet.

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Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2048511/hands-on-with-bay-trail-intels-latest-best-hope-for-tablet-relevance.html#tk.rss_laptopcomputers

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