My latest obsession, a junky Windows tablet

I’m in what must be a small minority. I enjoy Windows for content consumption. I keep meaning to write a post called “Windows tablets, a love story,” but in the meantime I want to share about my latest acquisition, a NuVision Duo 11. It’s an 11-inch Windows 10 tablet with a detachable keyboard. It came out about five years ago.

The build quality is decent, but the specs are pitiful. Intel Atom x5-Z8350 at 1.44 GHz, 2 gigs RAM, 32 gigs storage. I paid $100 for a refurb at a website I’d never heard of. The device is really slow and kinda crashy. It ought to be a disaster.

I’m very happy with this thing. Here’s why.

All I want to use it for is reading offline content, mainly ebooks and comics. Yes, I could use an iPad or Android tablet for ebooks and comics, but there’s something else. In the 2000s, Rolling Stone and the New Yorker released their entire magazine archives on DVDs that are accessible via proprietary Windows apps. I’m a huge fan of these products, but I think they weren’t super successful, mainly because by the time they came out, no one except lunatics like me wanted to browse locally installed archives. (The DVDs copy to a hard drive just fine.) Also, in the 2000s Windows was a poor consumption OS since it mainly ran only on desktops and laptops.

Windows 10 on a tablet turns out to be an acceptable consumption platform, though, and the magazine apps install just fine on the Duo 11, thanks to a 256-gig SD card. So I can happily browse my old New Yorkers as well as read ebooks in Calibre and Adobe Reader. Best of all, unlike most Windows devices the Duo 11 is fanless, so the reading experience is really quite good. Chef’s kiss.