Linx 1010: My Review

Disclaimer:  I was not paid to write this review. I do however have Amazon Referral Links. Secondly based on the charger connector & opening it up I found this is the Linx 1010b and NOT the Linx 1010 – I was sent the wrong device.

Around five years ago as of posting this article, I did a review on my Surface Pro which was a device I loved. It was quite powerful, looked nice and pretty much did everything I wanted with a tablet excluding the fact the battery life sucked big time. Sadly my Surface Pro has now been taken out of action and a repair job on it is not worth the cost so I decided to look for a new device – a new tablet that I can use while out and about but can still run a few things I want on it.

So here we are my review of the Linx 1010. I will be doing my review in a couple of sections and naturally, your usage may vary. I am going to add that I am not doing any stress tests or benchmarks – you can find them all over the World Wide Web. My review is based on the day-to-day usage I would have with it.

Specs

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first – the actual hardware that is inside the Linx 1010. Firstly it is no Surface Pro and the hardware is quite low end but let’s avoid being biased until we do our tests. The actual specs are.

• Processor: Intel Bay Trail-T Quad Core Z3735F up to 1.83 GHz processor.
• Operating System: Windows 8.1.
• Memory: 2GB LPDDR3.
• Display: 10.1-inch 16:9 IPS HD (1280 x 800) with 10-point multi-touchscreen.
• Graphics: Integrated Intel HD Graphics.
• Storage: 32GB eMMC.
• Camera: Front 2 MP and rear 2 MP.

You can find more information in the Linx 1010 Manual. I have uploaded it to Tweaked for your Pleasure as manuals have a habit of disappearing from the Internet.

Web Browsing & Office

Web browsing is pretty much the bread and butter of this device and not surprisingly this tablet does the job fine. You can easily browse the World Wide Web with Google Chrome and keep quite a lot of tabs open without seeing anything noticeable.

I figured I would try a few flash games to see how it would handle games from Facebook and it did the job fine. No noticeable lag and was pretty snappy on the battery. I also tried to post on WordPress, edit files using SCP and so on and didn’t have any problems at all.

As you can gather typing on the device did work with its built-in keyboard but this tablet also comes with a keyboard dock. Reading online I find so many people swear by it and how brilliant it is but I found it very bad. You could not touch type on it and so often the mouse “clicked” by itself. This may be a faulty keyboard dock but I had a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse so I used that for the rest of the test (Microsoft Designer Keyboard & Mouse).

Video

Playback

Video playback is the second major thing I imagine most people would use on a tablet and by video playback, I mean things like Netflix, YouTube and possibly something like Twitch where you would want to watch things in 1080p using Wi-Fi and this tablet does not disappoint here.

I was able to watch things on Netflix without any problem (then again my phone has no problem doing this), was able to watch things on YouTube without a single problem and watched a few people endlessly wiping on Deltascape 3.0 Savage on Final Fantasy XIV via Twitch.

It’s worth saying that during my test there was a part where I lost connection to the Internet but I believe this is more related to BT Openzone that I was using during these tests.

Webcam

This tablet has two webcams – one on the front and one on the back. As you could have likely already guessed the one on the front is pretty bad and I found it to be in a very odd position. It seems that the webcam is designed more for when used in portrait mode whereas otherwise the main usage I would have for it is using it on Skype which I wouldn’t use in portrait mode.

The back camera was pretty much the same thing.

Audio

Speakers

The speakers on this device are alright and are not something you would replace a set of speakers in your home for but it gets the job done. I was able to listen to some music without going nuts over the sound for an hour or two while testing YouTube, Netflix and so forth.

If you are going to use this tablet at home in a semi-fixed location it might be worth getting a set of Bluetooth speakers.

Microphone

The microphone was pretty bad but you can always add a Bluetooth headset (it worked fine with my Plantronics Voyager Legend). If you are expecting to use this to capture audio – I wouldn’t bother.

Gaming

Before we get onto this section I want to stress that this is NOT a gaming tablet nor do they market the tablet as so. This section is purely out of interest in doing what I could do on the Surface Pro. Secondly, due to storage, I used an external USB flash drive which sucked in terms of loading speed so count that in mind for my few comments below.

The first game I tried playing was Rimworld. It worked fine on it … for a while until the game started to slow down massively. There are mods that you can download for Rimworld that removes a lot of the pawns but I never wanted to try it with that.

Next, we had Crusader Kings II. At low speeds, the game wasn’t that bad but it ran a lot better on my Surface Pro. I was able to play one of my save files from the cloud saves where I formed Israel, made a custom empire called The Hebrew Empire and went around declaring wars on every Muslim nation next to me.

The last game I tried was naturally Final Fantasy XIV which did work at quite a low frame rate (around 20-30fps). I was able to do this by turning down every single setting, lowering the number of objects I could see at once and setting the resolution down to VGA (640×480). I did not try any dungeons or raids as I could not connect my Xbox One Wifi Adaptor due to using the other USB port for the flash drive (and Bluetooth never worked on this controller although the device did see it).

Out of interest I also tried the Stream in-house streaming or whatever it was called and it worked pretty well. Some hiccups here with the frame rate but it was playable.

Battery

The battery will be a very mixed feeling as I feel this is where the device fails. Overall the battery life itself isn’t bad at all. I left the screen on (although not that bright) while leaving the tablet to play music all night and when I went to sleep at 1 am it was still playing music from Jewish Music Stream when I woke up at around 11 am.

So a pretty strong battery … but that is the flaw. The tablet itself takes forever to charge using the built-in micro USB. Sadly there is no other power connector and I tried many high-speed cables, wall adaptors and my trusty PC and the results were the same – it was very slow charging.

Want to know how slow? I have been charging it from this afternoon from about 3 pm to 1 am the next day, which is 11%. Yep, I’ll let that sink in – horrible ain’t it? I am going to try other chargers and see if there are any firmware updates but just be warned this tablet can take ages to charge.

It’s worth saying that when plugged in it was always getting a charge.

My Opinion

It isn’t a bad tablet but I would avoid this simply due to the charging speed. Get one of the many better ones out there.