TECLAST X98 Air 3G First Impressions: Work and Play on a single device becomes a reality

Ever since I started my career on tech journalism, I have been on the look out for a computing device that will make work a pleasure or I could just use it to play some games if I ever need to. I personally own a heavy but powerful Lenovo laptop with discrete graphics and it didn’t fare quite well in its battery life if I were out the whole day without access to a wall socket. After a while, I decided that I should probably upgrade my old iPad 2 to an iPad Air a couple of years back and bought an expensive Logitech K810 Illuminated keyboard to go with. After that, I got fed up and decided that these two devices will have to be in my bag all the time wherever I go. Until…

The TECLAST X98 Air 3G tablet is a Dual OS (Operating System) tablet that I’ve been eyeing on as my work device for some time and recently, I was contacted by TECLAST Malaysia and happened to realize that the product is managed by a new company named Brightgate Distribution. I was excited, went on to have a quick chat with the folks and started unboxing thetablet the day I got it back as you can see from my unboxing video even although it was just uploaded recently.

Before I get into more details, here’s what you really need to understand the difference between a Dual Boot and Dual OS despite being very close terms.

Dual Boot literally means having two operating systems installed in one single storage and system environment and relies on the bootloader of one particular operating system to boot either one of the operating systems, for instance if you have bothWindows 8.1 and Ubuntu installed on a single hard drive, then you are relying either on a Windows Bootloader or Ubuntu’s very own GRUB bootloader to run each respective operating systems.

In contrast, the Dual OS mechanism allows you to boot into an entirely different system environment, in which we call it the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). In the case of the X98 Air 3G tablet, running Android and Windows on one single device isn’t as straightforward as you may think, as Android requires very specific hardware and drivers to run on, the manufacturer needs to be very careful on which hardware or features to be activated to avoid compatibility issues. In traditional cases such as the Transformer Book Trio from ASUS, it requires different processors onboard to power Android and Windows respectively, thanks to Intel’s support for Android, the TECLAST X98 Air 3G no longer requires that hardware configuration hence saving a lot of cost on the device.

In terms of design, I won’t call it unique as it looks totally like an iPad clone just like any Chinese tablets, but at least the tabletisn’t made up of any cheap plastic and it offers some additional expansion options that similar range tablets will not be able to offer – a MicroHDMI port, MiniSIM slot with HSPA+ support and a MicroSD card slot that takes up to 64GB of storage. A 5-megapixel auto focus main camera and 2-megapixel front camera is onboard the device as well for simple photography and you shouldn’t expect any great results from it, there’s also a pair of loudspeakers on the back that produces reasonably good audio quality. Otherwise, the X98 Air 3G tablet has WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth and an 8000mAh battery.

I have been actively using the X98 Air 3G tablet for the past three days, I lowered my expectations on the device to become merely a web browsing and texting device, my primary operating system is Windows and to my surprise, the entry-level hardware has managed to serve me really well with very some acceptable slow downs when more applications are opened concurrently. Once I’m done with Windows I’ll shut it down and switch over to Android and leave the device on standby to conserve power, I managed to achieve a full day of computing power with such a usage pattern and I will only need to charge the device at the end of the day.

Overall, this is a Chinese made product that I’m generally impressed with and have never regretted using as my sole working driver for the past three days, while its still too early to conclude if I’m able to overcome the device’s limitation – low internal storage and RAM, I’d really suggest you folks to not look at its negative side of things, but really, all you need to love about thetablet is its beautiful display.

The TECLAST X98 Air 3G will be available after 29 April 2015 with a SRP of RM899 and comes with a free screen protector, aprotective case and one year free Microsoft Office 365 Personal with 1TB OneDrive storage. Stay tuned for our full review coming up and meanwhile – #ChallengeAccepted.