Awesomely cheap
If you're looking at the Nextbook Flexx 11, you're probably in the same market as everyone who bought one. It's extremely affordable for a 2 in 1. I don't imagine anyone choosing it mainly because of great design, reliability, or the brand. But having said that, it's a great balance between price and what you get, especially here on ebay. I got mine for $69 and it just can not be beat. Here are some notes:
- the screen is IPS and fantastic for value. Bright and nice viewing angles (which is important as you'll use it in tablet mode too). It's a bit too bright at the lowest setting though, so reading in the dark can be difficult. I went into Intel display settings to turn down brightness, contrast, and gamma slightly and created a nighttime reading profile. This helps plenty.
- the weight and build overall is actually quite good, sturdy enough most of the time and feels borderline solid. Acceptable for me with the price certainly.
- as others have mentioned, the keyboard is not great. I'm typing this review on it right now and it works but as expected, key travel isn't ideal and for an ~11" screen laptop, it feels cramped. The backlit function is just for aesthetics as well as it often makes things worse in the dark. It's like aiming a flashlight at yourself while you try to read writing on the flashlight lightbulb. It doesn't work.
- the trackpad is much better than I expected. It's accurate and sensitive enough. It also has multi touch gestures like three finger tapping for middle click, three finger swiping up/down for showing start screen/desktop. Scrolling and zooming, and tapping are there also. No settings to tweak things like HP or Dell though. The scrolling direction is reversed in Windows 10 for people that noticed. You'll need to search up a registry edit to correct the direction.
- and yes, a big issue is the wobbling screen problem, in which wobbling the screen disconnects and reconnects the keyboard rapidly. On a table, it's not much of an issue. On a lap, it'll get mighty annoying fast. I've cleaned the contacts on both sides and even opened up the keyboard side of the connector to see if things can be fixed, but alas, it looks like a design flaw. People have suggested adding a long piece of felt running the width of the attachment joint and it seems to work well. The idea is to add a cushioning so that the screen doesn't wobble and induce the repeated disconnects. The felt goes between the front glass of the screen and the surface that it rests on when attached
- performance is very good for what it is. Atom processors and Windows have gone a long way so all your daily tasks run very remarkably smooth. I'm very impressed how optimized both the CPU and the OS are together now, maybe because I've used the first gen of Atoms on netbooks and those are very limited. The marketing just doesn't do it justice. No complains at all regarding performance, and I'm one of those geeks with an octacore desktop and highend CPU and GPU equipped laptop. And as always with the Atom line, battery life is very good, quite like your typical Android tablet.
- support isn't remotely close to mainstream OEMs. Be warned that you don't want to do a fresh installation of Windows or tinker with drivers. There is no support online for you to download Nextbook drivers and I haven't heard back from their support either. In fact, I'll be a little worried if a big Windows update comes along (e.g. Anniversary Update) and breaks something. We won't have access to any drivers to fix this on our own. For example, I uninstalled the Realtek I2S Codec driver since I had a driver update problem. I couldn't find drivers from Nextbook after and restoring/resetting doesn't help since there's no actual recovery image. Ended up having to go to Windows Update Catalog and finding a compatible drivers.
- partly related, my version comes with Win 10 Home 32 bit. The processor is 64bit compatible but without available support, I'm reluctant to try the 64 bit version. Chances are there'll be missing drivers and I won't be able to downgrade back to 32 bit easily. (I know 64 bit is a little out of this guy's league, but I was hoping I can install some 64 bit software just in case I need it for emergency)
It sure seems like quite a list of cons for this 2 in 1. But to be honest, knowing this now, I would still have purchased it given the price. There's simply not many good options when it comes to ultra low price 2 in 1 Windows machines. I'm sure I'll get a lot of value from this reading in tablet mode, doing emails with the keyboard, and bringing it on trips (e.g. connect to hotel TVs with the HDMI connection)... and if I drop it or lose it anywhere in between, no problem. It's awesomely cheap.
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned