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The jury is still out on super thin and light Windows 8 tablet-laptop hybrids, despite the efforts of the Lenovo Miix 10.
Certainly, there will come a time when they're perfectly powerful enough for most computer use, but right now the Intel Atom chips inside this, the Samsung Ativ Smart PC and the Acer Iconia W510 are just struggling a bit too much to make them ideal replacements for your laptop.
It's a balance with the interface too, of course. The Lenovo Miix might be slow, but it runs fairly reliably. But with no integrated trackpad, will it run your software usably?
We liked
The Lenovo Miix is smart, light, reasonably well-made and comes with an excellent keyboard to help you to use it like a laptop. The potential is here for it to be a great mobile work machine, provided you don't need to run anything too intensive.
The screen is really nice, too, and though it may not have a powerful processor, the speed with which it comes on from sleep is exactly what you'd want from a tablet.
We disliked
The lack of power really will be a deal-breaker for some people, as will the absence of a built-in mouse pointing device. If you really need a Windows 8 tablet, odds are it's going to be for a specific software reason, and if that software leans heavily on the CPU or has fiddly fields and buttons, this may not be the package for you.
The battery life was also a little on the disappointing side, and the lack of always-accessible USB ports is just silly.
Final verdict
The Lenovo Miix is more than capable of serving the needs of some people, but it's a definite niche. If the question is should the average person get this instead of an Ultrabook (even a low-end one that comes in at a similar price point), then the answer is no. The Asus VivoBook S200 is almost certainly a better bet.
But if there's something here you specifically want - the lightness and flexibility of just taking the tablet side while running Windows apps, or the corporate-friendliness of Windows - then this is one of the better machines of its kind.
