Review: Updated: Razer Blade

We reviewed Razer's Razer Blade Pro gaming laptop last year in September of 2012, and we found the 17-inch gaming laptop highly desirable. For the screen size, it was surprisingly thin, and it packed one heck of a performance punch.

Far and away, the feature that stood out most to us the most was the laptop's incredibly thin and light profile. We're unashamed to be MacBook fans—given Apple's superior notions of design, only the most devout Windows purist wouldn't be—but we nevertheless found ourselves hoping (praying?) that Razer might be onto something in terms of design and performance.

When you get right down to it, the 17-inch laptop just isn't for everyone—certainly not battle-hardened road warriors. But a 14-inch system with a similar emphasis on portability and performance? And boasting the same kind of emphasis on thinness and good looks as the 17-incher? Well, that's a different story.

(It's worth noting that, in conjunction with the release of the 14-inch Razer Blade, the 17-inch version slides over to become the Razer Blade Pro.)

To be honest, when Razer announced the new 14-inch Razer Blade gaming system we're reviewing here, we double-checked the specs and found ourselves wondering if this might just be the new laptop we've been dreaming of.

Our only real reservation was the screen resolution, which at 1600 x 900 offers far fewer pixels than the MacBook Pro's 2560 x 1600 Retina Display.

How big of a deal is this? And how does the Razer Blade stack up in terms of gaming performance?

The short answers are "not very" and "very well".

Let's jump into the review.

MacBook-style design, but with attitude

As a general rule, we try to avoid using the word sexy when describing devices and hardware, but the 14-inch Razer Blade is undeniably, truly sexy.

The laptop boasts the same exact design aesthetic as its bigger, older 17-inch brother. The black-matte aluminum finish and cool-looking Razer insignia on the lid make it clear that, even if this system has roughly the same profile as a MacBook Pro, it is not your typical portable computer.

Fluorescent green accents on the USB ports, the logo, and the backlit keyboard enhance the gamer vibe, but thankfully not too much. You'll get second looks from everyone from your grandmother to your friends to the guy sitting next to you on the plane with this laptop. That's more than you can say for some of the other rad-gamer designs out there today.

Part of the reason the Razer Blade is such a head turner is that it's surprisingly thin and light. Measuring just .66 inches high, 13.6 inches wide, and 9.3 inches long, it's actually thinner than the MacBook Pro. Considering the hardware packed into this thing (quad-core Intel Haswell CPU, next-gen Nvidia graphics part), this is no small feat.

Even the Razer Blade's 150 watt power adapter is smaller than most laptops' power bricks, making it an appropriate work/play/travel system.

The other reason the Blade is immediately lovable is its 14-inch, 1600 x 900 display, which emits a sharp enough image that we initially thought it was an IPS panel. It's not, but it's bright enough that you can use it in broad daylight, and boasts the kind of clarity and wide viewing angles that you normally find in IPS display.

The only downside to the display is that it does not run at a full 1080p HD resolution. The only way you'll get full HD resolutions is by connecting this laptop to a flat-screen monitor or HDTV via the HDMI cable.

We'll be honest: after spending a week testing and using the laptop as our primary rig (something we do with all the laptops that come across the review desk), the 1600 x 900 resolution bothered us a lot less than we thought it would.

Cool and quiet, even while gaming

Razer has gone out of its way to craft a thermally functional rig as well. Two small, quiet exhaust fans sit on the bottom of the chassis, and two thing rubber platforms give the fans some clearance for exhaust. During normal, non-intensive gaming operations, the laptop runs cool enough that you won't ever notice the fans or any heat. More surprisingly, even during our most rigorous gaming sessions, we still didn't hear the fans.

The Razer Blade's sound design is another nice touch. On either side of the keyboard are Dolby certified stereo speakers that sound surprisingly great.

In fact, the only real glaring weakness in the Razer Blade's design is the trackpad. Even at a glance, it will be clear to most users that the left and right buttons are insufficient for heavy duty use both working and playing.

Unfortunately, the flaws go a little deeper than this. At various moments during testing, we experienced a few different glitches, the most annoying of which was a random cursor jump that appeared to be caused by some kind of sensitivity to the palm of our left hand. Imagine editing a document and suddenly finding your cursor 3 sentences up, and you can probably feel our pain.

No matter what sensitivity adjustments we made in the Synaptics settings panel, we couldn't fully eradicate the problem. To be fair, 95% of the time we experienced a reliable, accurate touchpad experience.

Regardless, we would have greatly preferred a MacBook style clickable touchpad here. The touchpad wasn't a deal breaker for us, but it's a big source of concern, and might be for more particular users.

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Review: Updated: Lenovo Thinkpad Helix

Hey business travelers, if you found a magic lamp in the overhead compartment on your next flight, what would you wish for? Unlimited frequent flyer miles? Free first class upgrades for life? Leg room the length of a bowling lane? Or maybe you'd dream big and try to lighten the load in your carry on?

Lenovo is no genie, but that's one wish it's looking to grant. Its ThinkPad Helix is a convertible ultrabook, a Windows 8 tablet that hooks into a custom dock for laptop style productivity.

Lenovo has owned the ThinkPad name since acquiring it from IBM in 2005. Its maintained the brand's reputation with excellent laptops like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but its forays into hybrid machines have been more mixed.

While the ThinkPad Helix improves on the design of devices like the ThinkPad Tablet 2, it's not a Windows 8 dream machine. Lenovo has made some questionable design choices with the Helix, including an overhaul of the ThinkPad's signature trackpad that could dismay its most dedicated fans.

It's also priced the Helix into the upper echelons of the ultrabook market, with configurations starting at $1,649. That's a heavy asking price for a machine packing Ivy Bridge, not Haswell, the new Intel chip that's providing a dozen hours of battery life for the new MacBook Air.

When we first saw the ThinkPad Helix at CES 2013, our interest was piqued. Lenovo machines are famous for sound construction, and if there was ever a design that needed some love, it's the convertible ultrabook. But that was months ago, and the Helix might be too late to the game.

So should you go all in with the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix? Or keep letting your shoulder suffer with a separate tablet and laptop? Note that either option is cheaper than those obscene first class ticket prices.

Lenovo knows how to make a laptop for the suit and briefcase crowd, and that seems to be the target audience for the ThinkPad Helix. The machine has a matte black finish with a couple of red highlights. It makes for a look that's subdued if not terribly attractive. It has a rubbery feel that makes it easy to grip and pleasant to hold.

It's on the chunkier end of the ultrabook equation, with the tablet weighing 1.73 lbs, 3.54 lbs when joined with the keyboard stand. The tablet measures 11.66 x 7.37 x 0.46 inches. Docked with with its keyboard, it's 11.66 x 8.90 x 0.80 inches.

The Helix dock has two hooks that slide into the tablet and hold it in place, and a switch to the left to release it. It can be somewhat finicky to line it up right, but you can rest assured that it's a secure connection. That's one of the biggest advantages the Helix has over the ThinkPad Tablet 2: it can't tumble out of its dock, and it can fold up clamshell style like a true laptop. It's the more portable device of the two.

The Helix's dock does more than provide a keyboard. It actually has its own battery and fans, so the Helix gets additional longevity when its connected, and its processor overclocks for a noticeable performance boost.

The cost of this is ugly fans hidden behind an odd plastic flap. It's one of many complaints we have about the Helix's overall design. Like all convertibles, it's top heavy. This isn't a problem when you're using it at a desk, but on your lap or the couch, it's prone to toppling backwards.

It's also hard to open the Helix with one hand. There's no groove to grab it by, and if you just lift up the screen without holding onto the base, the two don't separate.

We're also not crazy about the tiny, sunken on/off and volume switches on the tablet. They're you need a fingernail to press them. When you're using the Helix as a tablet, it's ridiculous you can't use the easy to press, prominently placed Windows button to wake the device.

Like a Surface Pro and a lot of Windows 8 slates, the tablet has a wide form factor. It's awkward to type on the Helix tablet while holding it; unless you have thumbs like an orangutan you'll want to opt for the split onscreen keyboard.

The tablet is also very tall when held in portrait orientation. We felt a bit goofy holding it that way when doing some Kindle reading.

It's an aspect ration that's not great in the hand, but excellent for watching videos. It's a full 1080p screen, so Netflix and YouTube all look great. However, that ultra high native resolution makes the desktop and its apps look eye-strainingly small.

To combat this, we found ourselves zooming in on Google Chrome pages before just dropping the resolution down to 1600 x 1900; so much for full 1080p. All the Windows 8 apps looked fine though, this is really just a desktop issue.

Lenovo laptops are known for having great keyboards, and that reputation comes through for the ThinkPad Helix in spades. A lot of convertible keyboards, like the one on the Acer Iconia W510 and ThinkPad Tablet 2, are either cramped or lack keypress depth. That's not the case with typing on the Helix.

The keyboard has been truncated in some minor ways, like slightly smaller arrow keys. The function keys each pull double duty, but you can toggle on and off a function lock that circumvents this.

There's no backlight on this keyboard, which is a pity, and keys like caps lock don't glow when engaged. Instead Lenovo has built in on screen cues to let you know when they're active.

Minor quibbles aside, the overall typing experience on the ThinkPad Helix is very good. We'd say this is the best keyboard we've used on a hybrid machine. The keys are slightly curved and evenly spaced, with enough depth to the press that they're completely functional. For our money it easily bests the type cover on the Microsoft Surface.

The touchpad, however, is a different story. Lenovo has done away with the dedicated click buttons found on past ThinkPads and instead made the touchpad itself clickable. You can click by pressing down, or with a quick tap, anywhere on the pad. It also has multi-touch recognition, so a two finger tap is a right click, and sliding with two fingers is a scroll.

There are also multi-finger gestures, reminiscent of what you'll find on a MacBook, but optimized for Windows. For example, a four finger swipe switches between the tiled Start screen and the desktop.

The gestures are great, but the touchpad has been divided into different zones that overcomplicate things. If you scroll with two fingers to the top of the pad, the Helix starts to scroll until you pick your fingers up. It's too easy to trigger on accident and blow past what you want to see.

Basically, the touchpad feels finicky, and will likely annoy old school ThinkPad fans. At least they have the trackpoint to fall back to.

The Helix also comes equipped with a stylus, which you'll find useful if you plan to use a note taking app. Otherwise it's a good way to navigate the desktop when you're in tablet mode. It offers precision that you need to hit little things like a YouTube pause button or the X to close a window.

1.8Ghz Intel Core i5-3337U11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 ten point MultiTouch displayIntel HD 4000 graphics4GB PC3-10600 1333MHz DDR3LBluetooth 4.0 and NFC128GB Micro Solid State Drive, Serial ATA3

Those are the specs for our review unti, which retails for $1,679. Right off the bat, it's a real pity that the ThinkPad Helix is not a Haswell machine. While Intel's new fourth generation chip doesn't provide a lot of extra processing power, it's designed to provide extended battery life. That would've been perfect for this machine.

Not that the Helix is bad on power consumption. It actually boasts quite respectable battery life, but all day battery would help justify the premium price.

For ports, the Helix tablet has USB 2.0, a mini displayport, a full size SIM card slot (making it 3G and 4G LTE capable) and a headphone jack. It should be noted that all of these ports and slots, with the exception of the headphone jack, are on the bottom of the tablet and become inaccessible once the tablet has been docked.

The dock provides its own set of ports to compensate. You'll find two USB 3.0 ports, and a mini displayport all lined up along the rear of the dock.

The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix's SSD comes in three sizes: 128, 256 and 386 increments. It can also be upgraded to 8GB of RAM.

A 1.8 GHz processor and 4GB of RAM may seem small on paper, but in practice the ThinkPad Helix is a surprisingly capable machine. Both the Windows 8 tiled interface and desktop ran smoothly on our review unit.

Browsing in either Chrome or Internet Explorer, we could get a dozen tabs going before performance started to chug. This is with the tablet docked in its helpful stand, which provides extra cooling and allows the processor to overclock a little.

The performance enhancement is noticeable, and the fans generate minimal noise. This is by no means a gaming machine, but we were able to play some Half Life 2: Episode 2 with an acceptable framerate.

The stand also provides additional battery life. With its help, we generally got 7 to 8 hours of web surfing and word processing. As just a tablet, the Helix got between 5 and 6 hours. That's not bad at all, certainly better than a Surface Pro, but one can't help but think of what Haswell could've done for this machine.

When we first saw the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix at CES 2013, it had us really excited. We thought Lenovo had finally cracked the convertible ultrabook, a design we've never been totally sold on.

But that was months ago, in a pre-Haswell, 12-hour MacBook Air world. The ThinkPad Helix is better late than never, but its $1,679 price point makes it tough to recommend. Why? Let us break it down for you.

The ThinkPad Helix's keyboard is the best we've seen on a convertible machine. In our opinion, it's as small as you can go without getting cramped and awkward, and it still offers key presses that will satisfy typists used to banging away on a normal laptop keyboard.

The 1080p display is an excellent form factor and resolution for watching videos. The viewing angles are wide and there's not a visible pixel to be found.

The trademark ThinkPad matte black finish with spots of red comes through for the Helix. It's a subdued, classy and conservative design that will please the business crowd it's designed for.

The Helix also has good battery life, for an Ivy Bridge machine. An average of 7 hours docked, 5 to 6 as just a tablet is a competitive offering.

Again, it's really a shame that this is not a Haswell machine. Intel's new chip could've bolstered the Helix's already strong battery performance to a phenomenal degree.

The touchpad on the Helix is going to prove divisive. We liked the Windows 8 gestures, but the autoscroll zone got in the way more often than not. There are some thoughtful concepts here, but it's unintuitive overall.

The ThinkPad Helix is also very expensive, $500 more than a Surface Pro. We hate to keep harping about the MacBook Air, but consider this: you could get the base model of Apple's new ultrabook and a retina iPad for this price. That makes the ThinkPad Helix a very questionable value, handy convertible design or not.

And come to think of it, just how handy is that convertible design? You end up with a ugly flap on the back of your machine, and an awkwardly sized tablet with buttons so sunken they'll make you think twice when trimming your nails. Its top heavy design is also rather tippy on anything but a nice flat desk.

It's also annoying that the machine's high end resolution makes the desktop so small it's nearly illegible. Thank goodness there's a stylus to help you poke and prod all those little icons, but good luck reading anything unless you zoom in or turn down the resolution.

In terms of functionality, the ThinkPad Helix is one of the best convertible ultrabooks out there. It's decently powerful, has capable battery life and a keyboard that can actually get some typing done. It also has a 1080p display that's perfect for unwinding with Netflix.

But as far as design goes, the Helix stumbles big time. When docked, it feels like Dr. Frankenstein's hybrid PC/tablet, thanks to that goofy flap in the back and a top heavy construction.

It doesn't open easily, that finicky touchpad got on our nerves, and we found it awkward as a tablet. Its wide form factor is tough to handle, and its tiny little switch is annoying to turn on and off.

It's a jack of all trades, master of none, and that makes its heavy price tag hard to swallow. $1,679 is a lot to ask for this Ivy Bridge machine.

If you truly want a Windows 8 convertible ultrabook that's more functional than a Surface Pro, then the ThinkPad Helix is the way to go. However, we think you and your wallet would be better served by Microsoft's tablet or two separate machines. Save the money and put it towards a chiropractor; settle for two devices until Lenovo or someone else perfects this design and gets the price right.

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Review: Updated: Ouya

If you've never heard of Ouya, the $99/£99 Android-based gaming console, then you've likely never heard of Kickstarter. Back in 2012, the Ouya team took to the crowdfunding website, preached about open source gaming and promised a console to anyone who chipped in $99 or more.

The team ended up with over $8 million in funding. Needless to say, heads turned, and gamers and developers began to take notice.

Many months later, the Ouya's release date has arrived. Kickstarters who pledged enough have begun to receive their systems, and the console is being sold by big retailers like Amazon and Best Buy.

Now the moment of truth is here. Has the Ouya's mouth written a check its processor and launch lineup can't cash? Has it cracked the dam of the closed console norm? Or has it merely presented a reasonably priced Android box that will satisfy tinkerers and casual gamers? You're about to find out.

The Ouya is small, only a little bigger than an orange, and would fit easily in the palm of your hand. Not that it's a handheld system, it's your typical console box, meant to look lovely sitting next to your HDTV.

And it does look lovely. It's smooth, brushed metal exterior makes it look like an Apple prototype or something jettisoned from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Its power button sits on top, lighting up with a white Ouya logo when switched on. All of the Ouya's ports are hidden in the back, helping it keep its sleek look. It has micro-USB, HDMI, a power port and a full size USB port.

The heart of the Ouya is a Tegra 3 processor, the same chip you'd find in a Nexus 7 tablet or an HTC One X+. That's backed by 1GB of RAM and 6GB of internal storage.

That's not a powerhouse set up, but the Ouya's library is mostly indie games and ports of mobile titles, not graphically intense blockbusters.

Switch on your Ouya and you'll be greeted with an enthusiastic "Ooh-ya!" That's the Ouya's start screen; the Xbox 360 gives a thrum and a whoosh, the PlayStation 3 tunes up like an orchestra, and the Ouya proudly announces its own name, like a Pokémon entering battle.

The Ouya's main menu offers four categories: Play, Discover, Make and Manage. It's pleasingly simplistic, but once you start diving in, annoying design decisions rear their heads.

Play is where you'll find games and apps you've downloaded. It has a habit of arranging things in order of most recently accessed. It's irritating, like the Ouya is constantly shuffling the deck on you.

Discover is the Ouya store. It looks like the homepage of Netflix, only instead of arranging titles by genre, they're in playlists, of sorts. There's a list at the top titled Featured, which we're assuming are titles Ouya is pleased with and looking to promote. Then there are lists of games chosen by developers and media personalities.

Discover is a cluttered, repetitive space where a lot of the same games are featured over and over again. For example, Towerfall is currently the number one game in the first five lists on Ouya's Discover screen.

This makes it hard to get a sense of how many games are actually available for the system. You can actually browse by genre, but that option is buried at the very bottom of the screen.

Browsing and downloading games is a quirky, occasionally frustrating experience. The Discover screen takes a while to populate, and often leaves a lot of blank tiles before previews pop in. Then once you've selected a game to download, there's no queue to see the progress of all your choices.

Several times we selected a few games for download, left to do something else, and came back to find that only the last title we chose had downloaded. We're still not sure how Ouya's queuing works.

The most unfortunate part of the Ouya experience is easily the controller. Like the system itself, it's not bad to look at, but after using it for a little while, the flaws become obvious.

The controller feels hollow, probably due to the AA battery slots located under each grip. To get at them, you pop off the faceplates, which makes this peripheral seem extremely cheap.

Unfortunately, it's not really that cheap. While you get one controller with your $99/£99 system bundle, a controller on its lonesome costs $50/£39.99.

The Ouya's shoulder buttons offer a spongy, unpleasant press. Pull them slowly and you can actually hear the squeak of plastic rubbing against plastic.

So the aesthetics aren't wonderful, but how does the controller work? Sadly, not very well. We experience intermittent but not infrequent controller lag.

Playing at a desk only a few feet from the Ouya, the response time between the system and controller was perfect. Bringing the Ouya home and adding it to our entertainment center was what caused issues.

We're not sure if it was interference from other electronics or something else, but we had often experienced severe input lag when playing from the couch. We were shocked to find that sitting up and leaning forward sometimes helped. It's unacceptable that our posture and the matter of a foot or so could affect connectivity so severely.

Like the controller, Ouya's performance was inconsistent. The system leaps to life when powered on, menus are snappy, and games load in a reasonable timeframe. But then often times the Discover store wouldn't load properly, and a few of the Ouya's best games performed poorly.

To name names, ChronoBlade's framerate starts to stutter as soon as you unleash attacks with three or more foes on the screen. That's a big problem, since this is a Diablo/Gauntlet Legends-style dungeon brawler, where you and a friend take on dozens of enemies at once.

What's really sad is that this is a Facebook game, one meant to be played on a browser. This is either a sign of poor optimization, or that the Ouya's Tegra 3 chip isn't up to the task. Either way, not good.

The Ouya also runs awfully hot. After an admittedly song session of three hours or so, we went to turn off the system and discovered it was quite hot. Not fire hazard hot, but disconcertingly warm to be certain.

According to a ticker on the official Ouya website, there are 208 games available for this nascent system. That's a generous offering, especially considering that every game has a free component.

Games are between three and fifteen dollars, and the Ouya has a generous "try before you buy" philosophy. That's fortunate, since a lot of the games are very atypical, and it's hard to know what to expect. There are some true diamonds amongst the rough though.

Many of Ouya's games, including some of the best, like Knightmare Tower and Super Crate Box, take an arcade style approach. This means that rather than progress through a story where you can save your progress, you see how long you can survive, then start over and try to best that run. There are some great games in this vein, but they likely won't appeal to the average Halo fan.

Saturday Morning RPG

Then there are a lot of self-aware, ironic indie type games like Saturday Morning RPG and Fist of Awesome. There are games with purposely old school graphics and lots of references to eighties and nineties pop culture. You have to be enjoy the game's sense of humor to get the most out of the game.

Most of Ouya's larger, more fleshed out and traditional games are holdovers and ports from years back, or other systems. There's Final Fantasy III, a classic title first released in 1990, and A Bard's Tale, a tongue in cheek RPG that's been kicking around since 2004.

There are a few traditional action titles, such as Shadow Run. It's a decent third-person shooter in the vein of Gears of War, but it's been available from the Google Play Store for over a year now.

With most of these games, the attraction is being able to play them on your TV. It's not that Ouya is the only way to do this, you could hook a PC up to your flatscreen with HDMI, or use All Share or the right adapter with your Galaxy S4. The Ouya is just a simpler method more likely to appeal to the less tech savvy crowd.

Ironically though, it's the more technologicaly inclined that will probably have the most fun with the Ouya. It's advertised as moddable and hackable, so you could conceivable load pure Android onto it and just pop into Google Play, where there are a lot more games, abeit not as optimized for the big screen.

There are also ROMs and emulation, which we would not endorse, but the possibility is there. If you're willing to treat the Ouya as a science project, not your primary entertainment epicenter, you'll probably like it a lot more.

What the Ouya could really use though, is a video streaming service. Right now all it has is Twitch, a service that lets you watch other people play games. Games that the Ouya can't run.

With Netflix and Amazon onboard, it would have been easier to recommend the Ouya as a media streamer with some decent games.

Oh Ouya, how do you stack up? Your philosophy is so admirable, your price desirable, but what you actually deliver, well it isn't much.

At $99/£99 for a controller and system, the Ouya is priced to move. It's also attractive and demure, tiny and unassuming next to your typical console.

It does have a few very fun games. Tiny Tower, Knightmare Tower, Super Crate Box, You Don't Know Jack and Deep Dungeons of Doom were among our favorites. These game all offer some sort of free demo content, so it's hard to get burned by the store.

The Ouya's HDMI connection makes setup simple and means it outputs at 1080p. That means it could provide worthwhile streaming video.

Also, since you can add external storage via USB, you only need to be somewhat tech savvy to root it and install vanilla Android. Someone with the right set of hobbies could have a few fun weekends tinkering with the Ouya.

The Ouya's interface is obtuse, and doesn't make it easy find games. We had titles recommended to us by a colleague, and couldn't find them through browsing until we just typed in the name. If we hadn't been told about the game, we may never have found it.

The Ouya's controller frequently lagged and made games unplayable. That's a cardinal sin of video game hardware.

A few of the games suffered from poor frame rates as well, and the Ouya ran quite hot after a few hours of play. The Discover tablet was frequently filled with blank tiles, and took a while to populate. All in all, the performance comes off as unstable.

We know it's a game console first and foremost, but to earn a place in the living room, the Ouya desperately needs some media services.

Finally, we have to say the Ouya has no killer game, no title that made us think, "yes, this is why one buys an Ouya."

We really wanted to like the Ouya. Honest we did. The system's open philosophy and low price are admirable, especially after all the Xbox One DRM craziness that dominated E3 2013.

But the Ouya hasn't delivered a stable product, enough compelling games or controller that works to an acceptable degree.

That's not to say that the Ouya team can't right the ship. We'll be watching the Ouya to see how things improve, and will gladly update this review if new titles and stabilization make the Ouya less of sketchy investment.

Ironically, we're still playing Knightmare Tower, but on our laptop, in a browser. The Ouya has turned us on to some great games, we'd just prefer not to play them on the Ouya.

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Review: Updated: Razer Blade

We reviewed Razer's Razer Blade Pro gaming laptop last year in September of 2012, and we found the 17-inch gaming laptop highly desirable. For the screen size, it was surprisingly thin, and it packed one heck of a performance punch.

Far and away, the feature that stood out most to us the most was the laptop's incredibly thin and light profile. We're unashamed to be MacBook fans—given Apple's superior notions of design, only the most devout Windows purist wouldn't be—but we nevertheless found ourselves hoping (praying?) that Razer might be onto something in terms of design and performance.

When you get right down to it, the 17-inch laptop just isn't for everyone—certainly not battle-hardened road warriors. But a 14-inch system with a similar emphasis on portability and performance? And boasting the same kind of emphasis on thinness and good looks as the 17-incher? Well, that's a different story.

(It's worth noting that, in conjunction with the release of the 14-inch Razer Blade, the 17-inch version slides over to become the Razer Blade Pro.)

To be honest, when Razer announced the new 14-inch Razer Blade gaming system we're reviewing here, we double-checked the specs and found ourselves wondering if this might just be the new laptop we've been dreaming of.

Our only real reservation was the screen resolution, which at 1600 x 900 offers far fewer pixels than the MacBook Pro's 2560 x 1600 Retina Display.

How big of a deal is this? And how does the Razer Blade stack up in terms of gaming performance?

The short answers are "not very" and "very well".

Let's jump into the review.

MacBook-style design, but with attitude

As a general rule, we try to avoid using the word sexy when describing devices and hardware, but the 14-inch Razer Blade is undeniably, truly sexy.

The laptop boasts the same exact design aesthetic as its bigger, older 17-inch brother. The black-matte aluminum finish and cool-looking Razer insignia on the lid make it clear that, even if this system has roughly the same profile as a MacBook Pro, it is not your typical portable computer.

Fluorescent green accents on the USB ports, the logo, and the backlit keyboard enhance the gamer vibe, but thankfully not too much. You'll get second looks from everyone from your grandmother to your friends to the guy sitting next to you on the plane with this laptop. That's more than you can say for some of the other rad-gamer designs out there today.

Part of the reason the Razer Blade is such a head turner is that it's surprisingly thin and light. Measuring just .66 inches high, 13.6 inches wide, and 9.3 inches long, it's actually thinner than the MacBook Pro. Considering the hardware packed into this thing (quad-core Intel Haswell CPU, next-gen Nvidia graphics part), this is no small feat.

Even the Razer Blade's 150 watt power adapter is smaller than most laptops' power bricks, making it an appropriate work/play/travel system.

The other reason the Blade is immediately lovable is its 14-inch, 1600 x 900 display, which emits a sharp enough image that we initially thought it was an IPS panel. It's not, but it's bright enough that you can use it in broad daylight, and boasts the kind of clarity and wide viewing angles that you normally find in IPS display.

The only downside to the display is that it does not run at a full 1080p HD resolution. The only way you'll get full HD resolutions is by connecting this laptop to a flat-screen monitor or HDTV via the HDMI cable.

We'll be honest: after spending a week testing and using the laptop as our primary rig (something we do with all the laptops that come across the review desk), the 1600 x 900 resolution bothered us a lot less than we thought it would.

Cool and quiet, even while gaming

Razer has gone out of its way to craft a thermally functional rig as well. Two small, quiet exhaust fans sit on the bottom of the chassis, and two thing rubber platforms give the fans some clearance for exhaust. During normal, non-intensive gaming operations, the laptop runs cool enough that you won't ever notice the fans or any heat. More surprisingly, even during our most rigorous gaming sessions, we still didn't hear the fans.

The Razer Blade's sound design is another nice touch. On either side of the keyboard are Dolby certified stereo speakers that sound surprisingly great.

In fact, the only real glaring weakness in the Razer Blade's design is the trackpad. Even at a glance, it will be clear to most users that the left and right buttons are insufficient for heavy duty use both working and playing.

Unfortunately, the flaws go a little deeper than this. At various moments during testing, we experienced a few different glitches, the most annoying of which was a random cursor jump that appeared to be caused by some kind of sensitivity to the palm of our left hand. Imagine editing a document and suddenly finding your cursor 3 sentences up, and you can probably feel our pain.

No matter what sensitivity adjustments we made in the Synaptics settings panel, we couldn't fully eradicate the problem. To be fair, 95% of the time we experienced a reliable, accurate touchpad experience.

Regardless, we would have greatly preferred a MacBook style clickable touchpad here. The touchpad wasn't a deal breaker for us, but it's a big source of concern, and might be for more particular users.

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Review: Updated: Lenovo Thinkpad Helix

Hey business travelers, if you found a magic lamp in the overhead compartment on your next flight, what would you wish for? Unlimited frequent flyer miles? Free first class upgrades for life? Leg room the length of a bowling lane? Or maybe you'd dream big and try to lighten the load in your carry on?

Lenovo is no genie, but that's one wish it's looking to grant. Its ThinkPad Helix is a convertible ultrabook, a Windows 8 tablet that hooks into a custom dock for laptop style productivity.

Lenovo has owned the ThinkPad name since acquiring it from IBM in 2005. Its maintained the brand's reputation with excellent laptops like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but its forays into hybrid machines have been more mixed.

While the ThinkPad Helix improves on the design of devices like the ThinkPad Tablet 2, it's not a Windows 8 dream machine. Lenovo has made some questionable design choices with the Helix, including an overhaul of the ThinkPad's signature trackpad that could dismay its most dedicated fans.

It's also priced the Helix into the upper echelons of the ultrabook market, with configurations starting at $1,649. That's a heavy asking price for a machine packing Ivy Bridge, not Haswell, the new Intel chip that's providing a dozen hours of battery life for the new MacBook Air.

When we first saw the ThinkPad Helix at CES 2013, our interest was piqued. Lenovo machines are famous for sound construction, and if there was ever a design that needed some love, it's the convertible ultrabook. But that was months ago, and the Helix might be too late to the game.

So should you go all in with the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix? Or keep letting your shoulder suffer with a separate tablet and laptop? Note that either option is cheaper than those obscene first class ticket prices.

Lenovo knows how to make a laptop for the suit and briefcase crowd, and that seems to be the target audience for the ThinkPad Helix. The machine has a matte black finish with a couple of red highlights. It makes for a look that's subdued if not terribly attractive. It has a rubbery feel that makes it easy to grip and pleasant to hold.

It's on the chunkier end of the ultrabook equation, with the tablet weighing 1.73 lbs, 3.54 lbs when joined with the keyboard stand. The tablet measures 11.66 x 7.37 x 0.46 inches. Docked with with its keyboard, it's 11.66 x 8.90 x 0.80 inches.

The Helix dock has two hooks that slide into the tablet and hold it in place, and a switch to the left to release it. It can be somewhat finicky to line it up right, but you can rest assured that it's a secure connection. That's one of the biggest advantages the Helix has over the ThinkPad Tablet 2: it can't tumble out of its dock, and it can fold up clamshell style like a true laptop. It's the more portable device of the two.

The Helix's dock does more than provide a keyboard. It actually has its own battery and fans, so the Helix gets additional longevity when its connected, and its processor overclocks for a noticeable performance boost.

The cost of this is ugly fans hidden behind an odd plastic flap. It's one of many complaints we have about the Helix's overall design. Like all convertibles, it's top heavy. This isn't a problem when you're using it at a desk, but on your lap or the couch, it's prone to toppling backwards.

It's also hard to open the Helix with one hand. There's no groove to grab it by, and if you just lift up the screen without holding onto the base, the two don't separate.

We're also not crazy about the tiny, sunken on/off and volume switches on the tablet. They're you need a fingernail to press them. When you're using the Helix as a tablet, it's ridiculous you can't use the easy to press, prominently placed Windows button to wake the device.

Like a Surface Pro and a lot of Windows 8 slates, the tablet has a wide form factor. It's awkward to type on the Helix tablet while holding it; unless you have thumbs like an orangutan you'll want to opt for the split onscreen keyboard.

The tablet is also very tall when held in portrait orientation. We felt a bit goofy holding it that way when doing some Kindle reading.

It's an aspect ration that's not great in the hand, but excellent for watching videos. It's a full 1080p screen, so Netflix and YouTube all look great. However, that ultra high native resolution makes the desktop and its apps look eye-strainingly small.

To combat this, we found ourselves zooming in on Google Chrome pages before just dropping the resolution down to 1600 x 1900; so much for full 1080p. All the Windows 8 apps looked fine though, this is really just a desktop issue.

Lenovo laptops are known for having great keyboards, and that reputation comes through for the ThinkPad Helix in spades. A lot of convertible keyboards, like the one on the Acer Iconia W510 and ThinkPad Tablet 2, are either cramped or lack keypress depth. That's not the case with typing on the Helix.

The keyboard has been truncated in some minor ways, like slightly smaller arrow keys. The function keys each pull double duty, but you can toggle on and off a function lock that circumvents this.

There's no backlight on this keyboard, which is a pity, and keys like caps lock don't glow when engaged. Instead Lenovo has built in on screen cues to let you know when they're active.

Minor quibbles aside, the overall typing experience on the ThinkPad Helix is very good. We'd say this is the best keyboard we've used on a hybrid machine. The keys are slightly curved and evenly spaced, with enough depth to the press that they're completely functional. For our money it easily bests the type cover on the Microsoft Surface.

The touchpad, however, is a different story. Lenovo has done away with the dedicated click buttons found on past ThinkPads and instead made the touchpad itself clickable. You can click by pressing down, or with a quick tap, anywhere on the pad. It also has multi-touch recognition, so a two finger tap is a right click, and sliding with two fingers is a scroll.

There are also multi-finger gestures, reminiscent of what you'll find on a MacBook, but optimized for Windows. For example, a four finger swipe switches between the tiled Start screen and the desktop.

The gestures are great, but the touchpad has been divided into different zones that overcomplicate things. If you scroll with two fingers to the top of the pad, the Helix starts to scroll until you pick your fingers up. It's too easy to trigger on accident and blow past what you want to see.

Basically, the touchpad feels finicky, and will likely annoy old school ThinkPad fans. At least they have the trackpoint to fall back to.

The Helix also comes equipped with a stylus, which you'll find useful if you plan to use a note taking app. Otherwise it's a good way to navigate the desktop when you're in tablet mode. It offers precision that you need to hit little things like a YouTube pause button or the X to close a window.

1.8Ghz Intel Core i5-3337U11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 ten point MultiTouch displayIntel HD 4000 graphics4GB PC3-10600 1333MHz DDR3LBluetooth 4.0 and NFC128GB Micro Solid State Drive, Serial ATA3

Those are the specs for our review unti, which retails for $1,679. Right off the bat, it's a real pity that the ThinkPad Helix is not a Haswell machine. While Intel's new fourth generation chip doesn't provide a lot of extra processing power, it's designed to provide extended battery life. That would've been perfect for this machine.

Not that the Helix is bad on power consumption. It actually boasts quite respectable battery life, but all day battery would help justify the premium price.

For ports, the Helix tablet has USB 2.0, a mini displayport, a full size SIM card slot (making it 3G and 4G LTE capable) and a headphone jack. It should be noted that all of these ports and slots, with the exception of the headphone jack, are on the bottom of the tablet and become inaccessible once the tablet has been docked.

The dock provides its own set of ports to compensate. You'll find two USB 3.0 ports, and a mini displayport all lined up along the rear of the dock.

The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix's SSD comes in three sizes: 128, 256 and 386 increments. It can also be upgraded to 8GB of RAM.

A 1.8 GHz processor and 4GB of RAM may seem small on paper, but in practice the ThinkPad Helix is a surprisingly capable machine. Both the Windows 8 tiled interface and desktop ran smoothly on our review unit.

Browsing in either Chrome or Internet Explorer, we could get a dozen tabs going before performance started to chug. This is with the tablet docked in its helpful stand, which provides extra cooling and allows the processor to overclock a little.

The performance enhancement is noticeable, and the fans generate minimal noise. This is by no means a gaming machine, but we were able to play some Half Life 2: Episode 2 with an acceptable framerate.

The stand also provides additional battery life. With its help, we generally got 7 to 8 hours of web surfing and word processing. As just a tablet, the Helix got between 5 and 6 hours. That's not bad at all, certainly better than a Surface Pro, but one can't help but think of what Haswell could've done for this machine.

When we first saw the Lenovo ThinkPad Helix at CES 2013, it had us really excited. We thought Lenovo had finally cracked the convertible ultrabook, a design we've never been totally sold on.

But that was months ago, in a pre-Haswell, 12-hour MacBook Air world. The ThinkPad Helix is better late than never, but its $1,679 price point makes it tough to recommend. Why? Let us break it down for you.

The ThinkPad Helix's keyboard is the best we've seen on a convertible machine. In our opinion, it's as small as you can go without getting cramped and awkward, and it still offers key presses that will satisfy typists used to banging away on a normal laptop keyboard.

The 1080p display is an excellent form factor and resolution for watching videos. The viewing angles are wide and there's not a visible pixel to be found.

The trademark ThinkPad matte black finish with spots of red comes through for the Helix. It's a subdued, classy and conservative design that will please the business crowd it's designed for.

The Helix also has good battery life, for an Ivy Bridge machine. An average of 7 hours docked, 5 to 6 as just a tablet is a competitive offering.

Again, it's really a shame that this is not a Haswell machine. Intel's new chip could've bolstered the Helix's already strong battery performance to a phenomenal degree.

The touchpad on the Helix is going to prove divisive. We liked the Windows 8 gestures, but the autoscroll zone got in the way more often than not. There are some thoughtful concepts here, but it's unintuitive overall.

The ThinkPad Helix is also very expensive, $500 more than a Surface Pro. We hate to keep harping about the MacBook Air, but consider this: you could get the base model of Apple's new ultrabook and a retina iPad for this price. That makes the ThinkPad Helix a very questionable value, handy convertible design or not.

And come to think of it, just how handy is that convertible design? You end up with a ugly flap on the back of your machine, and an awkwardly sized tablet with buttons so sunken they'll make you think twice when trimming your nails. Its top heavy design is also rather tippy on anything but a nice flat desk.

It's also annoying that the machine's high end resolution makes the desktop so small it's nearly illegible. Thank goodness there's a stylus to help you poke and prod all those little icons, but good luck reading anything unless you zoom in or turn down the resolution.

In terms of functionality, the ThinkPad Helix is one of the best convertible ultrabooks out there. It's decently powerful, has capable battery life and a keyboard that can actually get some typing done. It also has a 1080p display that's perfect for unwinding with Netflix.

But as far as design goes, the Helix stumbles big time. When docked, it feels like Dr. Frankenstein's hybrid PC/tablet, thanks to that goofy flap in the back and a top heavy construction.

It doesn't open easily, that finicky touchpad got on our nerves, and we found it awkward as a tablet. Its wide form factor is tough to handle, and its tiny little switch is annoying to turn on and off.

It's a jack of all trades, master of none, and that makes its heavy price tag hard to swallow. $1,679 is a lot to ask for this Ivy Bridge machine.

If you truly want a Windows 8 convertible ultrabook that's more functional than a Surface Pro, then the ThinkPad Helix is the way to go. However, we think you and your wallet would be better served by Microsoft's tablet or two separate machines. Save the money and put it towards a chiropractor; settle for two devices until Lenovo or someone else perfects this design and gets the price right.

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Hands-on review: Updated: Samsung Ativ Q

Samsung reckons its solved the Windows 8 / Android conundrum: stuff 'em both in one device.

But this isn't just a case of plopping in dual booting modes and letting the world work out how to get from one to another – both are operating from the same Intel Haswell chip and as such seem to fly along in both guises.

The design of the Samsung Ativ Q is impressive: with a 13.3-inch screen, it certainly feels more laptop than tablet, but the superbly high resolution display (QHD 3200x1800, which equates to a 275ppi) means that you'll be more than impressed whether you're checking out Windows 8 (the full-fat version, not the confusing Windows RT some users will have encountered) or Android 4.2.2.

The tablet/laptop hybrid is a well-designed beast, as while it's running all these different options it's not the chunkiest thing to plop in your bag. It's never going to take on the likes of the Sony Xperia Tablet Z in the design stakes, coming in at 1.29KG, which makes it quite hard to hold in one hand.

Samsung seems to think it's portable and easy to use as a tablet option, but in our tests it didn't appear to be that way at all - it almost felt like your digits were going to split in two after extended use.

It does come with a high-sensitivity S Pen to play around with though - this is a really useful choice on a tablet with a screen this size.

It's not fair to lambast the Ativ Q for weight when you consider what's included though - as there's the aforementioned Haswell chip alongside a fully-formed keyboard, complete with an old-school nipple in the middle to allow you to flick the mouse around the screen.

Samsung is making a big deal about the fact that the tablet has a million modes for looking at the screen (for a million, read four).

It can operate in tablet mode, with a quick push from the bottom settling it nicely above the keyboard. You can then tilt the screen upwards to activate 'floating' mode - although we're not entirely sure why Samsung has added that mode, as it looks like the screen is caught halfway between two settings.

Keep pushing that screen and the display will flip, and the keyboard will be used as a stand for easy breakfast eating of whatever you fancy browsing over the cornflakes. This mode impressed us the most, as it was both stable and offered the best way to interact with the tablet if you're not bothered about tapping away on the keys.

The specs of the Samsung Ativ Q are pretty decent for a tablet / laptop hybrid, with 327 x 217.8 x 13.mm dimensions making it a real boon in the back. You can plug in a USB 3.0 device, a USB 2.0 option, HDMI output, as well as a webcam capable of 720p HD video (perfect if you want to show the internet what you're up to) and a microSD card slot, which allows you to expand the 128GB SSD that's built in.

The battery life is predicted to last nine hours, with Samsung hoping that you'll actually be able to eke things out a little bit more than that with the Intel Haswell chip running things in the background. This is all supplemented with a 4GB RAM chip, as well as an Intel HD Graphics 4400 chip to enable users to have a good ol' gaming session on the go.

You can even use the device to steer racing games through the inbuilt accelerometer; however we struggled to hold it for long enough to actually do this, so while we're all for functionality, it was a little harder to see how that will be a real selling point.

Some will wonder how easy it will be to flip between Android and Windows 8, and the answer is very easy indeed. You can either jump back to Windows from Android by pressing the Windows button stuck on the bottom of the display, or you can jump the other way by using the dedicated Android icon, which appears as an icon in the Live Tiles area.

You could just jump into the traditional desktop zone and move through that way, but it's not the simplest method. The main thing to take away is that flipping between the two modes is exceptionally fast, and fingers crossed that won't slow down when you throw too many apps on there.

On the subject of apps, we were impressed with the way you could pin Android apps to the Start Screen of the Windows section, making it easy to open Google Maps without having to flip into Android mode. Most apps seemed to work seamlessly, and it was impressive that there was no lag.

The keyboard works pretty well, although the travel on the keys themselves is pretty poor, meaning you'll have to work hard to get up to a decent typing speed without making mistakes.

There are a few S Pen-dedicated apps, but the pen will work for nearly all native apps on the Ativ Q - with this device, we can really see the S Pen being a boon.

We would say there are a number of accessories available for the Samsung Ativ Q, but there's basically an overly-expensive looking cover that only those with no knowledge of the third party market will buy, and a wireless mouse, which only those... well, the same as the cover, really.

Samsung has lobbed a number of its own apps into the mix of the Ativ Q, but the real thing we liked the most is getting the best of both worlds on one tablet - the Q was an impressive beast either as an Android tablet or a Windows 8 device.

We can see this becoming a part of daily life without much of an issue, and while the weight is a lot more than you'd expect for an Android tablet, if you're considering a laptop replacement this should be a real part of your consideration.

We're still waiting to hear price, which will make all the difference, but should this sit somewhere palatable Samsung will have a real winner on its hands.

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Hands-on review: Updated: Windows 8.1

We've finally had some hands-on time with an official build of Windows 8.1 - and yes, many of the rumours and leaks are accurate. The Start button is back, you can boot to the desktop and use the same image as your desktop. SkyDrive is built in to sync files - on Windows 8.1 and Windows RT.

But this isn't Microsoft backing away from what we still want to call Metro; key Microsoft apps like Mail and Xbox Music have been updated, there are new apps for food and fitness and there is a 'modern' version of Office on the way.

If you're reading this in the UK, note there have been some issues with installing the Release Preview on British English devices. Find out more here.

Microsoft is still convinced that Windows can scale from an 8-inch tablet all the way up to the 27-inch twin screens on your desk at work, so there are changes to the Start screen, new ways of laying out multiple apps side by side on screen and almost all the configuration options from the control panel make it into PC Settings (except for those boot to desktop settings, which stay on the desktop - right-click on the taskbar to get them). So how coherent does it all feel?

The Lock screen turns into a photo gallery, powered by the same Microsoft Research tech behind the screensavers in Windows Media Center and the Windows 8 Photos app, picking related and timely photos automatically. You can unlock the camera or answer a Skype call quickly without needing to fiddle with a password. If small tablets get popular, that will be useful.

The Start screen gets new large tile sizes for select apps like Weather and Finance so you can see more information at once, although apps have to be specially built to use this. You can pick from far more colours to customise the Start screen backgrounds - some of which animate subtly as you scroll sideways - or you can use your desktop background, in which case your tiles scroll but your background is fixed.

If you're used to the small swipe you use on the Windows 8 start screen to select a tile, get unused to it. That now swipes you down to the Apps screen instead (although the small swipe still works in apps like the Windows Store, at least in this version).

To select a tile, press and hold on it. You can still select multiple tiles and now you can do useful things to all the tiles you have selected. You can also select multiple tiles on the Apps screen and pin them to Start as a group. As this is the only place you get tiles for newly installed apps, it's a useful option.

Sorting the Apps screen by how often you use apps gives you a quick list of frequent apps you haven't pinned yet. And once you've done all that work, you can have your Start screen sync across all your PCs so you don't have to do it again.

Two big new interface changes are the new smart search and the way Windows 8.1 handles multiple modern app windows on screen – especially on large monitors. When you use the Search charm – which Microsoft refers to by the Windows-S keyboard shortcut more than the charms bar – you get the same suggestions of apps to launch, settings to open and other searches you might be interested in.

But now, those all show up in the Search pane itself, rather than in a distracting full-screen. And both apps and settings show up in the same list rather than separate lists that can fool you into thinking Windows doesn't have any way to change settings.

You can still see search results in a full-screen view but that's not just a boring list of tiles and titles. Bing combines results from your PC and SkyDrive, from the content inside your apps and from the Web. By the time Windows 8.1 launches smart search it will include email messages, though it doesn't yet. If you have documents that match your search, they show up first. But Bing will also try to find a person, place, band, album or other entity that matches what you're looking for and build an instant search 'hero' that's like a mini app full of content.

What you get depends on what you're searching for; if it's a person, you get Wikipedia information (other apps will be able to suggest content like this but Wikipedia is the first) and photos; if it's a place, you get directions and reviews and opening hours and links to book on OpenTable or call them with Skype. For a band or album you get videos and music tracks – that you can play from Xbox Music.

You can swipe through the search view to see the full overview, pinch to get a semantic zoom view that shows the categories of results or tap to get more details (like a bigger map) without launching a different app. This is useful when you have a lot of information to look through as well as an appealing presentation for more fun information. And if you don't want a big-screen experience to browse through, remember you can get at individual results quickly from the search pane.

When you do open Windows Store apps, you're no longer restricted to snapping them into one large and one small window. On a small screen like a 10" Surface RT or Surface Pro screen, you can make a window a third, half or two thirds of the screen or any other multiple of 50 pixels – but we could still only get two apps on screen at once.

Some windows pick their own size – opening an attachment from the mail app uses two thirds of the screen for an image or half the screen for a web page. Open another app once you already have two windows and the icon waits on screen for you to drag it into the window you want it to use. That means you don't get the new app straightaway, but it also means it doesn't replace something you were looking at without giving you a choice.

On a larger screen, you can have three apps open side by side, or even four (and again you can choose whether to have each window take up a third of the screen or have two wide windows and one skinny one or any other way of filling the screen).

And if you have two screens, you can put multiple Store apps on both of them, so with the right screens you can have seven or eight apps at once. Whether you see three or four apps on a screen depends not just on the screen size and the resolution but also the DPI and scaling ratio of the screen. At that point you're getting into complex calculations that are difficult to explain and it looks like the only way to find out how many apps you'll be able to have side by side on a screen is to keep opening them until you can't fit another app in.

The return of the Start button to the desktop is the most obvious change in the Windows 8.1 desktop (and no, in this build you can't turn it back off again). But there are other subtle differences.

You can turn off the trigger in the top right corner that shows the charms bar when you use your mouse and the one in the top left corner that shows a thumbnail of the next app running in the background.

When you use the Search charm on the desktop it opens the Search pane on top of what you're doing, rather than throwing you out to the Start screen.

Libraries no longer show up in Explorer automatically, even though they're still the way you put media into the Xbox Music and Video apps and the first place Mail looks when you add attachments. They're right there in the File Picker when you use Windows Store apps.

When you right-click on folders in Explorer the option to add them to a library is still on the context menu, but if you want to find and work with them in Explorer you have to turn them back on in the navigation pane. Instead you see This PC where you're used to seeing Computer, along with SkyDrive which is installed as part of Windows (in both 8.1 and RT 8.1) and syncs some of your files automatically.

To avoid filling all the storage on a tablet with a small drive, all you get by default is the Documents and Pictures folders from your SkyDrive. You can see your other folders and the names of all the files in them, and when you click on a file Windows 8.1 automatically pulls it down from SkyDrive and caches it offline and syncs changes to it.

You can also select files in the modern SkyDrive app to use offline, but there's no longer a separate desktop interface for picking folders to sync.

Also key is Internet Explorer 11. The first thing you'll notice is how fast it is. Even with multiple tabs set as your home page, on a Surface Pro the browser opens and starts loading pages almost faster than you can time. That feels a little faster in the desktop version because you can see that your tabs are loading, but the immersive full-screen IE is equally speedy. It's also rather more powerful than the full-screen IE in Windows 8.

Instead of just 10 tabs you can have up to 100 tabs open at once, and you can open a second copy of the browser and have another 100 tabs in there as well. Switching between different tabs is extremely fast but it also didn't make our test machine use a lot of CPU or memory to keep the tabs open. Swiping back to a page you've already looked at is far faster than in IE 10 – you don't have to wait for it reload, it's just there pretty much as soon as you swipe. Another thing that speeds up performance, especially with the Flip Ahead option from IE 10 that works out what the next page in a multi-page story is going to be, is the way IE can preload up to two pages so they're already there when you swipe forwards.

Here's one change that might take some time to get used to: When you press and hold on a link, instead of a context menu over the web page you get an app bar at the bottom giving you the choice of seeing it in a new tab or a new window – which is a quick way of opening a second browser.

You can see and manage a lot more information in the modern version of IE. What's more, you can see the folders you've organised favourites into, and you can move favourites into the right folder there, as well. You can also see which sites you've saved passwords for (which will sync between all the PCs you use your Microsoft account with) and remove them if you don't want the password saved any more. If you don't actually want full screen browsing in the full-screen version of IE you can have the address bar and small versions of the tab buttons on screen all the time.

If you were looking at a site on a different PC you can also go in and see the list of tabs there and open the site you want. You even get the 'back stack' so you can browse back through the pages you were on before you clicked the link to load the most recent page in that tab. If you know you'll want to refer to a page later you can share it to the new Reading List but this requires less planning ahead.

And there are a couple of improvements that just make life easier, especially on tablets with no keyboard or trackpad. Web sites that have hover menus and drag and drop work reliably with touch instead of you having to press and tap and fiddle to tap in exactly the right place – or have the menu activate and send you to a link on the hover menu when you only wanted to look at it. And when you hit an email address field or a phone number field in a web page that's been coded for it, you'll get the special keyboard layout for email or numbers.

Microsoft believes WIndows can scale to any device

That's the kind of convenience we're used to on a smartphone. There are a lot of ways Microsoft is trying to make small Windows tablets (7, 8 and 9" models, like the new Acer) feel like a very powerful smartphone, from Bluetooth 4 LE support to working with devices like the Sphero ball that have only worked with smartphones before. But even if you don't want your Windows PC to feel like a phone, IE 11 is an excellent update. Even if you don't use a single new feature, you'll love the new performance.

Xbox Music is much improved, as is Mail (although we've seen preview of later versions of both with more features that we're eagerly awaiting). There are some new great new apps.

We love the Reading List that lets you collect interesting links from IE and Windows Store apps to come back to later (perhaps on another PC as they sync) and the Alarms app has a clean, fresh look that's quirky and reminiscent of Windows Phone at its most appealing.

The Camera app now has Photosynth panoramas built in; tap the panorama button and start moving your tablet around (this would be very awkward on a notebook) to stitch together images into a scene that can cover as much of 360 degrees as you have patience for. The stitching is good – especially if you don't move too fast – although not perfect. This will shine on the smaller 8" Windows tablets we expect to see coming to the market if Acer succeeds.

With many of the features from the Photos app moved to the Lock screen, it's now a very basic interface for viewing – but it also has far more editing options. The vignettes and filters are the kind of thing you find on smartphone apps but the Colour Enhance options are impressive.

Drag the marker onto a colour in the image and move the slider around the circular control to saturate or fade out that colour throughout the image. Drag it to another colour and choose a different level. You can use this to make an image more vibrant or give it a muted effect. The Photos app is also far faster (and for now, at least, you can still get the Windows 8 version from the Windows Store).

But then there are apps that you have to wonder about Microsoft spending time on. Health & Fitness is a great dashboard for Microsoft's Health Vault service, but that continues to have few features outside the U.S. And Food & Drink is a nice demo of waving your hand in front of a webcam to scroll through pages when you have cake batter on your hands, but it's hard to see it competing with the dozens of other food apps on the market.

Windows 8.1 isn't a whole new operating system: it isn't the same leap as Windows 7 to 8. But it's more than a service pack as well. Built-in SkyDrive sync is very welcome – and transforms Windows RT 8.1 into a far more powerful system. Internet Explorer gets some significant improvements, on the desktop and in the modern version, too.

Performance feels generally faster, even for simple things like zipping up files. The interface changes won't please everyone, especially if you liked the Windows 8 Start screen and don't feel you need for yet another Windows key on screen - or if you were hoping for the Windows 7 Start menu back.

Some things, like customising tiles on the Start screen, feel a little more long-winded until you get used to them. But generally the interface feels more consistent and easier to learn. We love the new on-screen keyboard where you can swipe up on the top row of keys to type letters. And the expanded PC Settings gives the mass of control panel options a clean, simple interface that Windows has needed for years.

If you use the Windows Store you aren't going to be able to avoid the prompts and promotions to try out the Windows 8.1 preview. We'll need to run it for longer to see if it's stable enough to recommend as your daily operating system (it's been rock solid so far). We might have hoped for more major new features, but in eight months Microsoft has delivered a sensible and welcome update to Windows 8.

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