I have the Asus 3s10 which I bought in California direct from Asus.
I have had a Hauwei Mediapad M3 and currently also own a Nvidia K1.
I wish this device had the Hisilicon Kirin 950 which is really a nice soc. The problem with the Hauwei and this device is the graphics chip. The Hauwei is crippled by the Mali 880mp4 version which if they just used the mp8 version would have driven the slate and soc much better performance. That being said the software and non laminated screen and okay sound left the device feeling half baked and half used of its potential with 4 GB DDR 4 ram the Hauwei could have been great.
Where the Hauwei fails the Asus pretty much improves on except in graphics.
The Asus has 64gb storage which is more than most at this price and very nice to have.
Really the biggest problem with this brand come down to two things. The graphics chip and the Asus zen UI and bloatware. Since this device has a mediocre graphics chip the additional bloatware and GUI layer really screws up the performance. Also the buttons on the bottom of the tab are poorly designed. The Hauwei Mediapad use of the fingerprint scanner as a gesture to go back and recent tabs was a really smart and intuitive use which gave more screen real estate. On this tab you don’t need to worry about screen size so on screen buttons like stock Android would have been a better choice than the hard to find capacitive buttons specially in landscape. I really appreciate my Nvidia K1 because of its basically stock interface with some really useful additions and tweaks and updates. Really all manufacturers could learn something from how Nvidia updates their devices, well at least the K1.
If you can get past the zen UI and disable all of the apps and add nova launcher you get a much better experience but it is still hampered by the baked in mods. All that being said for most Android games I have played including asphalt 8 it runs great. Like Chris said you get the occasional stutter but mostly real world experience is good.
The tab browses the web very quickly and loads pages faster than my K1. Also the 4×3 aspect ratio and retina screen make for a wonderful web experience.
The sound on this thing is really loud and sometimes even the lowest setting is still too high. I hope Asus can add some more adjustment in the volume and a 4 speaker set up or a speaker on both sides of the tab would have been a better choice for movies and gaming. However the volume is really good and fairly deep for a tablet.
The screen to me for an LCD is one of the best I have used. My Nvidia K1 has a better looking screen to me but it is way smaller so this screen is really excellent. Viewing angles are good and the Asus control for the display is very useful.
The hexacore processor is a mixed bad to me. The graphics chip is old and medium grade when it came out in 2014 so now it is not very capable. The CPU is pretty fast but about 20 percent or so slower than the Kirin 950. This is because the Kirin has four A72 cores running up to 2.3 GHz and four a53’s running at 1.8. The mediatek uses only two A72 cores at 2.1ghz and four a53’s@ 1.7 GHz. Also the ram is ddr3 in the Asus vs ddr4 in the Hauwei.
I have benchmarks on all three tablets and the results really show a lot of useful information. The graphics on the K1 is still leaps ahead of the Kirin 950 or the Mediatek 8176 but on the CPU side for most benchmarks things change in favor of the newer 64 bit SOCs. In one compute Geekbench benchmark the K1 actually beat out the Mediatek by a factor of three which I was very surprised at. And where the K1 CPU failed against the newer chips it was not by a huge margin. The Mediatek 8176 came out in October of 2016 so it is pretty new vs the K1 which came out in 2014 about three years ago!
So if you are browsing the web, doing some light word editing and maybe even some light image manipulation this would be an ideal device.
I am torn whether to keep it or not. My Nvidia still does everything I want but this device is at least as fast if not faster for most tasks has a larger screen and good sound although I have yet to find a better sounding tablet than the K1 with front facing speakers.
I had a Cube 9x and Teclast x98pro and this tablet is way better than both. The Teclast I had was a disaster when I tried to reset it. I could never get it running again. Thank goodness Geekbuying took it back.
So in summary for the Android market which has a rather lackluster selection of tablets the Asus 3s10 is a solid choice. It does come with some aforementioned drawbacks but overall if you can live with them it offers a lot in a very well built and attractive unibody aluminum case. There are few tablets equal to its specs like a hexacore processor with 4gb ram and retina screen with gorilla glass 3 in an all aluminum unibody case for $300 so on paper it is a great value. Just realize it has less than stellar graphics capabilities and is hampered by some really heavy Zen UI layer which you will either appreciate or really get annoyed. I am in the latter group but the hardware is impressive. For media consumption and the game her or there it is the best tablet out there at this price. If you are into gaming Nvidia K1 is still a better value although it comes with its own set of issues but that is another review.
Hope this helps someone make a choice. I feel most of the tablets out there are a bit of a compromise. I would really like to see Asus make the exact same tab but a performance model with better CPU and GPU and a more stock UI say around $400 and they would really have an iPad alternative.
