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Venturer Prime Pro 12 TS

VERDICT – a vivid Full HD touchscreen saves this budget hybrid from feeling a little too cheap.

We approached the Prime Pro 12 TS with trepidation; at £350, it makes sense that overall quality is on the up, but this is still firmly at the budget end of the market for Windows 10 2-in-1s. And even with the tablet’s trapezium shape evoking the Microsoft Surface range, there’s a sense – at least initially –that you’re once again getting exactly what you pay for.

The screen bezels, for example, are on the chunky side –and because the front-facing 2-megapixel camera is placed dead center of the left panel (when in landscape mode), the left bezel is thicker than the right, forcing the screen ever so slightly off-center. In fact, the whole tablet is rather thick; at 11.7mm deep, it’s bulkier than the old Surface 2, and with the keyboard/stand attachment folded on either side, the whole thing measures 24.6mm across. That’s roughly the same as a couple of ultra-portable laptops stacked together.

LOW KEY

At least it’s still light, and we could happily carry the Prime Pro 12 TS about in a satchel without issue. There are other design successes, too–for instance, it uses a physical connector to dock the tablet into the keyboard, rather than relying on Bluetooth (which is slower and fiddlier), as some cheap 2-in-1s do. The soft-touch matt texture on both the keyboard and the tablet’s rear is also quite nice, though the ‘metallic black’ finish doesn’t entirely mask the use of plastics.

It also doesn’t mask what is, unfortunately, another sub-par keyboard/trackpad combo. To be fair, this is included in the box, and there have been some improvements over the Bravo Win 10K: since the Prime Pro 12 TS is a larger tablet, the keyboard is larger, so it’s easier to type on accurately. There’s also much more grip when used on a desk.

However, shallow travel and a limp, mushy action (especially on the spacebar) make it difficult to get used to, and the little folding stand at the rear of the keyboard attachment (there’s no Surface-style integrated kickstand) doesn’t do much to prevent the tablet toppling backwards when it’s on your lap.

The trackpad is even worse. There’s no tactile feedback for left-and right-clicks whatsoever, and responsiveness is inconsistent; it sometimes registers taps and multi-touch gestures fine, but we’ve also seen the cursor only react to input after a delay, as well as quick taps misinterpreted as swipes.

WITH FLYING COLORS

Frankly, we preferred to prod at the touchscreen, even with the keyboard docked. This LCD display is, it should be said, one of the Prime Pro 12 TS’s finer points. At 12.2 inches diagonally with a 1,920x1,200 resolution, it’s remarkably well-spec’d for a £350 2-in-1, and its benchmark results are generally favorable. There’s nothing amazing about its peak brightness of 214.4cd/m2 (it struggles in direct sunlight), 745:1 contract ratio or black luminance of 0.2878cd/m2, but it covers a very respectable 87.8% of the sRGB color gamut, so it’s a lot more vibrant than the Bravo Win 10K.

Even with some backlight bleeding around the edges, we could quite happily use the Prime Pro 12 TS for watching videos, and the generous proportions and Full HD resolution mean it’s surprisingly capable of dual-window multitasking. The rear-firing speaker also lived up to our (admittedly, highly tempered) expectations: clarity is decent enough for film and TV dialogue, though it won’t go terribly loud, and it’s light on bass.

ATOMIC BORE

A more worrying limitation is the processor: it’s a tiny quad-core Intel Atom x5-Z8300, running at 1.44GHz with a Turbo Boost clock of 1.84GHz. Together with 4GB of RAM, it’s not enough to handle our tough 4K benchmarks, so we ran the more easy-going 1080p version instead. Even so, it didn’t exactly blaze through the tests, scoring just 36 in the image test (the least demanding segment), 47 in the video test and 39 in the multitasking test, for an overall score of 41.

While this isn’t bad for the money – it’s close to the identically priced Asus Transformer Mini (Shopper 349) and its final score of 45 –readers with eidetic memories of low-budget 2-in-1s will recall that the £150 Bravo Win 10K also managed 41 overall. Indeed, the Atom x5-Z8300 may be a newer CPU than the 10K’s Atom Z3735F,but they’re extremely similar in terms of real-world performance, and it’s disappointing to see that paying an extra £200 nets you pretty much nothing in the way of performance gains.

STAY-AT-HOME PAD

Thus the Prime Pro 12 TS, despite its enterprising name, is still best off sticking to basic tasks such as web browsing, word processing and media viewing, and even then, it can start to chug if you have too many tabs or windows open. Silent running (afforded by the lack of a fan) is only a minor consolation prize.

It’s not much of a gaming machine, either, as it failed to produce playable frame rates in our 720p Dirt Showdown test. High graphics settings with 4x MSAA enabled yielded only 14fps, and dropping to Ultra Low quality merely bumped this to 15fps. Only the most basic games will cooperate with the Atom x5-Z8300’s integrated graphics. Minecraft, for instance, can run well enough on default settings.

Another reason to limit the Prime Pro 12 TS to simple jobs is the battery life. In our usual video playback test, with flight mode enabled and screen brightness set to 170cd/m2, it lasted only 5h 23m before shutting down –that’s over an hour longer than the Bravo Win 10K, but less than half of what the Asus Transformer Mini can do in the same conditions. In any case, you’ll need to reach for the charging cable at least once a day if you’re using it as your main Windows machine, possibly more if it’s pulling double duties as a home/leisure device.

PORTHAUL

You’ll also likely need to make use of the tablet’s microSD card slot, as internal storage is limited to just a 64GB Flash drive –that’s Chromebook low, albeit not entirely unexpected. A spacious and speedy SSD would be asking rather a lot at this price.

To Venturer’s credit, the tablet covers all bases in terms of connectivity. Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11n Wi-Fi handles wireless, while physically, the microSD slot is joined by a full-sized USB3 port, Mini HDMI output, and 3.5mm jack, taking care of data, video, and audio respectively. There’s a Micro USB port as well, though this can only be used for charging.

It wouldn’t have hurt to squeeze another full-sized USB port on there somewhere, as plugging in a single thumb drive or peripheral (such as a mouse, to get around the troublesome trackpad) will prevent the use of any others until you remove it again. Still, when even the mighty Surface Pro 4(Shopper 336) has the same issue, it’s hard to hold it against Venturer’s low-cost take on the 2-in-1.

HAVINGTHE DECENCY

On that note, here’s why a device with so many flaws is walking away with a good score: first, it’s a rarity in providing a 12.2 inches Full HD Windows 10 tablet at such a low price. The only comparable alternative we can find –the Transformer Mini has a relatively low 1,280x800 panel – is the Linx 12V64, which we haven’t tested (or, if we’re honest, even heard of until recently), but has seemingly identical core specs. Second, unlike the Bravo Win 10K, the Prime Pro 12 TS doesn’t feel like it makes one (or more) compromise too many. After early frustrations with the keyboard and trackpad, it’s fine for light use, especially when taking full advantage of the colorful screen for some video streaming. It’s far from perfect, or even great, but it is just about good enough for your £350.

SPECIFICATIONS:

PROCESSOR - Quad-core 1.44 GHz Intel Atom x5-Z8300

RAM - 4GB

DIMENSIONS - 300x206x118mm (tablet only), 300x213x24.6mm (with keyboard)

WEIGHT - 907mm (tablet only), 1.5kg (with keyboard)

SCREEN SIZE - 12.2in

SCREEN RESOLUTION - 1,920x1,200

GRAPHICS ADAPTOR – Intel HD Graphics

STORAGE - 64GB eMMC

OPERATING SYSTEM – Windows 10 Home

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