It seems All-in-Ones are starting to get increasingly popular, at least with manufacturers like Lenovo, who has just announced its ThinkVision AIO at CES. The ThinkVision is a 28″ AIO with a 3840 x 2160 resolution (UHD, or the so called “4k” resolution), that will be powered by a Tegra 4 chip and cost $1,200.
UHD resolution displays seem to become more popular this year, too, although they still seem to be quite expensive, and it’s probably going to be another year or two, before just about anyone can afford them, but they’re getting there faster than what most people were expecting, so that’s a good thing.
The ThinkVision also comes with 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 3 HDMI ports, an Ethernet port, and it can detect 10 fingers using the touch screen. The strange thing about it having an Ethernet port is that it doesn’t actually come with Wi-Fi. A device without Wi-Fi in 2014 sounds pretty ridiculous, especially if you’re going to pay $1,200 for it, but this is actually not the biggest problem I have with this device.
What worries me most about this device is that it’s going to be launched in 2014 with Tegra 4 instead of Tegra K1. It’s actually quite surprising that so many companies at CES seem to be announcing Tegra 4-based products, as if it were a new chip. The disappointing thing about it is not necessarily that it’s an “older” chip, but that it may not be able to handle that resolution very well.
Tegra 4 may be able to “technically” support UHD, but it most likely supports it in the same way that Tegra 3 “technically” supported 2560 x 1600 resolutions, when in practice it barely ran well enough on 1920 x 1200 devices. I have a rule for this kind of thing. Never buy anything that has “first generation chips” that support a new “high resolution”. Wait at least until the 2nd, or even the third generation.
If it’s the first generation to support UHD, it will barely do it properly. The second one (at least in mobile GPUs) should be about twice as fast, so that’s quite a big difference, while the third one should be four times as fast than what is needed to support that resolution, so it should be flawless. Bottom line is, I wouldn’t get anything with UHD resolution that doesn’t come at least with a Tegra 5 or similar GPU, or you may be one of those early adopters that gets burned by new technology because it’s not fully baked yet.