Part 1 – Setting the Scene
Come around the winter fire kids! Let me tell you a story, this particular story is about my search for a work device without breaking the bank.
I am an unashamed tech geek, I love things all bright and shiny. I love playing around without the newest tech. In addition, I am always on the hunt for the best device for my particular needs and wants. Whether that be smartphone, tablet, laptop etc.
I also on the other hand have a wife and family, this means that I can’t always get the stuff that I want and have to make more practical decisions so that a) my wife doesn’t kill me and b) I can still pay my mortgage (in that order).
Technology now plays a part in everybody’s professional life and mine is no different. The healthcare sector isn’t immune to this. Yes we aren’t doing video-editing, coding or sys-admin work in hospitals (well frontline healthcare staff aren’t anyway). But medical notes, clinic letters, email communication, presentations, governance meetings all need a good computing device. However, the healthcare sector is far behind the private and commercial industries. I work for an organisation which has rudimentary (at best) computing facilities. I mean, we’ve just had our office computers upgraded to Windows 7 from XP!
You may say that the answer to this is easy. Get a reasonably-specced Ultrabook of whatever variety. And frankly you’d be right. However I came across a few articles on the web. Firstly Winbeta report that “Microsoft assumes the mantle of best-selling tablet maker in terms of online sales in October”. Around the same time, business analysts were saying “Strategy Analytics believes that Windows is fast becoming a premium OS for higher-ASP tablets. Windows will allegedly gradually grab market share away from dirt-cheap Android tablets…Windows could get almost 1/5 of annual tablet sales by 2019.” Considering that at the moment that share is 1/7%, that’s one hell of growth.
Reading through the reports it seems the strategy is working at the two ends of the market and not by directly competing with the iPad. The High-End is where the Surfaces do well. I think it is safe to assume that this prompted Apple to launch their iPad Pro. The customer here is fundamentally a tech-geek often with money and knows what they want. The low-end, traditionally dominated by a variety of android slates, is the other place of growth. This is a sector where more casual consumers look to bag a bargain. Here the “Windows” brand has more recognition and value. One of the Microsoft’s ploys has been the not charging OEMs a licence fee for certain sizes of tablets.
Getting back to me, I wondered whether I could capitalise on this in order to get an effective work machine, and not have to rob a bank to do so. This is technically termed “being a cheapskate” but after all a “reasonably specced Ultrabook” would easily be over a grand. Could I use cheap Windows Tablet instead?
So I went and bought a Lenovo Miix 3 from ebay for £139.
Check out Part 2 where I review the device and see if being a cheapskate worked out!