Kupa X11 Pro Tablet

The Kupa X11 Pro Tablet ($799 direct) is the first product we've seen from Kupa America, but for its first product out of the gate, Kupa makes a strong showing. The X11 Pro's Atom Z670 may not match the laptop-grade processor found in the Samsung Series 7 Slate (700T1A) ($1,349.99 direct, 4 stars), but it squeezes out performance scores that top most similarly equipped tablets. Throw in a healthy collection of ports, a long-lasting battery, and a user interface that says "fingertips welcome," and you've got one of the better Windows tablets we've reviewed.

Design

The Kupa X11 Pro has a blocky chassis with rounded corners but square edges. The capacitive touch screen is coated with a silky-smooth matte finish that your fingers will glide over easily and that won't gather fingerprints to the degree that a glass screen will. The included digital pen offers more precise cursor control, but the X11 Pro also has a UI optimized for fat, imprecise fingertips, with extra-wide scroll bars and oversized icons. The digital pen offers pressure-sensitive input, a real boon to designers and users who want to make the most of the tablet's artistic capabilities.

On the backside of the tablet, you'll find an oddly shaped grill for the mono speaker. That teardrop shape is actually Kupa's logo, one half of a stylized yin and yang. The bezel is glossy black, and the surrounding chassis is dark gray plastic. The bottom edge of the chassis is tapered, which adds a bit of comfort while holding the tablet. Above the screen is a 2-megapixel webcam, and there's another camera (3-megapixel) on the back side of the tablet.

The design is sturdy and good-looking, in an industrial sort of way, but tablets are hands-on devices, and the Kupa X11 Pro isn't particularly comfortable to hold. It's also heavy, tipping the scales at 2.09 pounds, outweighing both the 1.79-pound ViewSonic ViewPad 10pro ($699.99 street, 2.5 stars) and the 2-pound Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 (Intel Atom Z690) ($999.99 direct, 4 stars). Another gripe is the fact that, while the Kupa X11 Pro comes with a pen-style stylus, there's no place to stow it, and no tether to secure it to the tablet. If this tablet sees use in any shared environment, like a retail store, be ready to have the stylus walk away.

Features
The X11 Pro is equipped with a variety of ports and connections, with all of the physical connections found on the right-hand edge of the tablet. There you'll find two USB 2.0 ports, a mini HDMI-out port, a headphone jack, and a SIM card slot for 3G mobile broadband. On the bottom edge of the tablet, you'll see two on/off slider switches for the integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connection and mobile broadband, respectively. Mobile broadband requires a compatible SIM card. The tablet is also equipped with Bluetooth 2.1. You'll also feel secure using the X11 Pro for business, with an integrated TPM chip and fingerprint reader for effortless, secure logins.

The X11 Pro is equipped with a 64GB solid-state drive (SSD), the same size found in the Fujitsu Q550 and double that of the Acer Iconia Tab W500-BZ467 ($549.99 direct, 3.5 stars). The folks at Kupa have also taken a page from the ultrabook, leveraging the speed of the SSD to promise near-instant resume and speedy boot times. The X11 Pro comes preinstalled with Windows 7 Professional, though the use of an Intel Atom processor limits it to being 32-bit. The big, touchable icons on the desktop include a sample version of ArtRage 2, a paint program, and Daum PotPlayer, a free video player whose Korean roots are evident in the Hangul characters that ornament the English-language menus. Along with the freeware, you'll find a few offerings from Microsoft as well, including Microsoft Word 2007, Microsoft OneNote 2007, and Microsoft Security Essentials.

Performance
The X11 Pro comes equipped with a 1.5GHz Intel Atom Z670 processor, the same dual-core processor found in both the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 and the Motion Computing CL900 ($1,250 street, 3.5 stars). But even though the hardware inside is the same, the performance is not. In the processor test CineBench, the Kupa X11 Pro scored 0.26 point, leaving the Q550 and the CL900 (both scored 0.19) in the dust. This is impressive performance for an Atom, but higher scores were produced by the AMD C-50 processor found in the Acer Iconia Tab W500-BZ467 (0.39 point).

Kupa claims that the X11 Pro will last for 10 hours on a single charge. In our MobileMark 2007 test, it scored a respectable 7 hours 11 minutes. By comparison, the recently reviewed Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 lasted 7:08 and the Motion Computing CL900 7:24, while the ViewSonic ViewPad 10pro managed only 4:27. This puts the X11 Pro among the longer-lasting tablets, and it's not unlikely that, if used for tasks like checking e-mail rather than streaming video, a user could conceivably eke out the 10 hours claimed by Kupa.

With its strong performance, intelligent user interface, and 7-plus hours of battery-life, the Kupa X11 Pro is a strong addition to the Windows tablet space. While we can gripe about the clunky design and the lack of a tether for the stylus, the X11 Pro ranks highly among 32-bit Windows tablets, and while it can't replace the category-leading Samsung Series 7 Slate, it matches the likes of the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 and the Acer Iconia Tab W500-BZ467?two of the better Windows tablets we've seen.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Kupa X11 Pro Tablet with several other tablets side by side.

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