Venturer BravoWin 10K review – a Windows 10 hybrid for £150

You probably haven’t heard of Venturer before, but this Hong Kong-based company has a long history of producing compact 2-in-1 Windows hybrids, with the BravoWin 10K being one of its latest. Of course, the main attraction is its price of just £149, making it one of the cheapest Windows 10 laptops we’ve tested. However, you certainly get what you pay for with the BravoWin 10K, as its basic plastic chassis feels incredibly cheap and poorly made, showing plenty of flex in the lid and keyboard.

Its hinge and screen also emit a worryingly loud creak whenever you open up the laptop, and I feel like I could easily snap the hinge backwards without applying too much effort. Admittedly, Venturer claims it’s done extensive drop-testing on the BravoWin 10K, but I can’t help shake the feeling it wouldn’t survive long if it fell off your desk or was repeatedly chucked into a bag with careless abandon.

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Keyboard and touchpad

Naturally, due to its small, compact size, Venturer’s had to make some compromises on the keyboard and touchpad. The keys, for instance, are very small, which might be fine for those with small hands, but I found them to be very cramped, and I frequently missed a lot of keys as a result.

The strip of felt underneath the hinge also didn’t provide a massive amount of grip, either, as even a slight push on the palm rest would send it juddering backwards. As a result, it frequently slid around my desk when I was using it, and it was a constant struggle to keep it in place.

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The touchpad is also shockingly slow and unresponsive, as the cursor repeatedly lagged behind my finger movements. Of course, there’s always the option to do away with the keyboard and simply use the BravoWin as a tablet instead. In fact, I found it much more pleasant to use as a tablet, and touchscreen inputs felt a lot quicker and snappier than the touchpad.

Performance

However, a responsive touchscreen isn’t much consolation when the device as a whole is rather lacking in speed, as the BravoWin 10K only comes equipped with a quad-core 1.3GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor and 2GB of RAM. It wasn’t able to complete our normal 4K benchmarks, for instance, so I had to re-run them using a 1080p video instead.

Admittedly, it actually scored much higher in our 1080p benchmark tests than other £150 2-in-1 devices we’ve tested recently, such as the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14. However, its overall score of 41 means it’s still not really cut out for high-level multitasking.

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It can handle basic word processing and general office applications, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to have multiple web browser windows open at the same time, you’ll often have to wait while it tries to load them. The back of the screen also became very hot during even the most basic of processors, which isn’t exactly ideal when trying to use it as a tablet.

Likewise, its integrated Intel HD Graphics chip isn’t built for anything but the very lightest of games. It failed our usual Dirt Showdown test, for example, and it barely broke 15fps when I turned everything down to its very lowest settings. I still just about managed a bit of Minecraft on its lowest settings, but it simply won’t cope with anything more demanding.

Battery life

Not even the BravoWind 10K’s battery life can redeem it, as it lasted just 4 hours and 5 minutes in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our standard brightness measurement of 170 cd/m2. Compare that to the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14, which lasted 11 hours and 20 minutes in the same test, and the BravoWin 10K falls well short of living up to its portable potential.

Display

Of course, for £150, you’re never going to get a particularly fantastic-looking display on the BravoWin 10K, but it actually produced much better results in our display tests than I was expecting. While its 1,280×800 resolution is quite grainy for a 10.1in display, its 72% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut certainly isn’t the worst score I’ve seen from a laptop, and its contrast ratio of 959:1 is very respectable indeed.

It’s not massively bright, but a peak white level of 224cd/m2 is more than enough when you’re using it indoors. You’d certainly have to set to maximum brightness if you end up using it outdoors, but this will probably be a fair rare occurrence given its poor battery life.

Ports and storage

It does, however, come with a fair selection of ports, all of which are housed around the side of the display. You get a full-sized USB3 port, a Micro USB port, a microSD card slot and a Mini HDMI port for connecting it to an external display. There’s also a headphone jack and support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

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You’ll probably want to take advantage of its microSD slot, as the BravoWin 10K only has 32GB of eMMC storage available. However, it only supports cards up to 64GB in size, so if you need any more space than that, you’ll need to be prepared to store the rest of your files in the cloud. It’s a similar setup to other cut-price laptops we’ve seen recently, such as the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 as well as just about any entry-level Chromebook, but this may not be ideal if you like to store your files locally. As a result, you might want to consider spending a little bit more and buying something with a proper 500GB hard disk.

Conclusion

Of course, at £150, it would be churlish to be too hard on the Venturer BravoWin 10K, but even at this low price you can get a lot more for your money. It might be reasonably quick, but it’s not exactly the most elegant-looking device around, and its awkward keyboard and terrible touchpad make it an exercise in frustration when it comes to actually doing any work on it. Combine that with terrible battery life and a grainy, lacklustre screen that overheats, and the BravoWin 10K is just one huge compromise.

Instead, you’d be much better off buying the Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14. This also costs £150 and has an infinitely superior keyboard, much higher build quality and it also throws in a year’s subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Personal to the mix, making it excellent value for money and a much better buy than the Venturer BravoWin 10K. Alternatively, the Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA can be had for around £200 and is a far nicer-to-use hybrid if that’s what you really need. Alternatively, check out our regularly updated Best cheap laptop article for even more laptop bargains.